


Barricade

by devovitsuasartes



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Bipolar Disorder, M/M, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-27
Updated: 2017-02-09
Packaged: 2018-09-20 04:24:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 38,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9475481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devovitsuasartes/pseuds/devovitsuasartes
Summary: Ian is in Chicago. Mickey is in Mexico. But there's nothing like the end of the world to bring people closer together.a.k.a.The zombie apocalypse story that no one asked for.





	1. Day One

There’s a woman lying on the hot asphalt of the road, reaching out for Ian, and he isn’t trying to help her. Some small part of him, in the back of his head, is telling him that he needs to do his job and rush in to save her life, but he can’t seem to move. His EMT kit hangs heavily, loosely from his shoulder. Somewhere, Rita is yelling at him, but Ian can’t seem to move because the woman is snarling gutturally at him, and the woman is torn in half.

She’s actually dragging herself across the road, bloodied fingertips digging into the rough surface, and leaving the rest of her body behind in the car wreck. The more she moves, the more internal organs spill out of her, but she doesn’t seem to care. She’s not screaming. She’s not in pain.

 _She’s not alive_ , Ian’s brain whispers to him, and he knows what crazy feels like and this isn’t it. This is really happening.

‘Ian, what the fuck are you doing?’ Rita has grabbed his shoulder, is dragging him backwards. He feels his arm lift of his own accord and point at the half-woman clawing her way determinedly towards him.

‘She’s…’

‘Ian, I know. We’re supposed to leave those ones. Focus on people we can save.’

Finally, Ian lifts his head. He stares out across the stretch of highway, the pile-up of cars, the people screaming and crying and scrambling over them. There’s a man running towards Ian, blood running down his face, and he doesn’t see the woman on the ground. She grabs his leg and he trips and then she’s _biting_ him. Sinking her teeth into the fat of his calf while he screams and screams and…

Finally, Ian snaps out of it. He runs forward and unceremoniously kicks the half-woman in the face, and her head is ripped free of the man’s leg with a mouthful of flesh between her teeth. The man leans heavily into Ian, sobbing, and Ian’s knees nearly buckle. Throwing the man’s arm around his shoulder, Ian pulls him away from the half-woman, staggers back to the ambulance. Rita joins him, helps support the bleeding man, puts pressure on the wound as some people stream past and others gather round, begging for help, tugging on Ian’s uniform. 

‘What’s the ETA on the cavalry?’ he asks Rita, a little stunned by how calm he sounds.

She clenches her jaw. ‘They’re not coming. 

‘What do you mean, they’re not coming? 

‘I mean, they’re _not coming,_ Ian. It’s like this everywhere. The city’s being evacuated. The army’s moving in. We’re supposed to grab whoever we can and move to a camp they’re setting up off I-88.’

A woman pushes through the crowd, holding a wailing toddler out with both hands. The little girl’s arm is broken and there’s blood running down her face and her mother is babbling in a language that Ian doesn’t understand but he nods, grabs the girl, mutters something about how she’s going to be OK as he puts her in a seat in the back of the ambulance. The girl’s mother clambers past Ian to get in with her daughter, and it’s already getting too crowded back there. They’re surrounded on all sides by people begging for help and Ian helps a couple more into the ambulance but there are too many of them.

‘We gotta go,’ Rita says quietly, close to Ian’s ear. ‘We need to go now or we’ll never get through this crowd.’

Running on autopilot, Ian nods. ‘You drive,’ he says, climbing into the back of the ambulance, pulling one door closed as Rita slams the other one. The chorus of wails gets louder and people start banging on the doors and on the side of the vehicle. Ian sees Rita barely manage to climb into the front seat, tendrils of hair all over her face as she starts the engine. Slowly, slowly, they peel out and away from the crowd of fleeing people. There are more thuds on the side of the ambulance as people desperately try to catch a ride, but they fall away as Rita picks up speed.

‘Hold on to something,’ Ian tells the huddled, terrified passengers, his eyes darting around as he tries to figure out who needs the most immediate attention. He settles on the man with the bitten leg, who seems to be mostly unconscious, his face turning grey as his eyelids droop.

As Ian grabs a big pad of gauze and puts pressure on the wound, his mind races. Carl is back at military school, thank god, but Lip, Fiona, Liam, Debbie… Ian has no idea where they might be. Did they get out of the city already? Jesus, this all happened so fast. There were an oddly high number of calls to the station when he arrived at work that morning and then, just a few hours later… chaos.

‘Sir, can you hear me?’ Ian says sharply to the man with the bitten leg, who is completely unresponsive. Ian frowns. It doesn’t make sense. The bite is nasty, for sure, but it’s mainly a superficial injury. Ian’s seen people pass out from shock and it doesn’t look like this. It doesn’t even look like the guy is breathing.

Wait. The guy isn’t breathing.

‘Shit,’ Ian mutters. The little girl with the broken arm is staring at him with wide eyes.

Ian grabs the guy’s wrist, feels for a pulse. Nothing.

The rocking of the ambulance is making Ian feel sick.

‘Everybody make room!’ he yells, dragging the guy to the center of the ambulance floor and laying him on his back. Blood pounding in his ears, Ian starts to go through the motions of CPR - which isn’t easy at the best of times, never mind in the back of an ambulance full of people going 60 miles an hour.

‘What’s going on back there?’ Rita yells.

‘Just keep driving!’ Ian yells back. And while he’s distracted, the guy wakes up again.

And snarls.

And grabs Ian by the throat. 

What happens next, Ian only remembers later in flashes. He remembers the little girl screaming. He remembers the dead guy’s teeth snapping close to his throat. He remembers how strong the man suddenly became, like an unstoppable force. He remembers thinking about the bite, and about the little girl, and about the very real danger that every passenger in the ambulance was in.

And he remembers saying, again, to Rita, ‘Just keep driving.’ 

He remembers saying, again, to the frightened passengers, ‘Hold on to something.’

Ian only means to open the back of the ambulance and throw the guy out, but the guy is so strong and he won’t let go of Ian’s throat. Ian loses his balance, feels the lurch in his stomach as he’s dragged backwards, and then he’s tumbling over and over and over with pain bursting in fresh spots all over his body, until he finally rolls to a stop. His bloodied face pressed against the ground, Ian listens to the wail of the siren fade as he’s left behind.

* * *

The Gallagher house is empty when Ian finally arrives.

It's eerie to find the place so quiet. He can see the empty places where belongings have hurriedly been snatched on the way out, but the family baseball bat is in its usual place and there's a note roughly impaled on the nail as well. Ian reaches out, touches it with bloody fingers.  

 

> Ian
> 
> We're heading to the emergency shelter.
> 
> Don't fucking die.
> 
> Lip

On the step directly below the baseball bat is Ian’s old school backpack. Clenching his jaw against the pain, he kneels down and unzips it one-handed. Inside are bottles of water, packets of jerky, Pop Tarts, a few bruised apples, a can of pepper spray, and Ian’s remaining pills. He was due to go to the clinic for a refill soon, and there aren’t many left.

Ian feels a clench in his chest as he looks down at the hurriedly assembled supplies. They were fleeing for their lives, but they took the time to throw this together for him. To leave a note, even though they had no idea whether or not Ian would come back here. He zips the bag up again, stands up and hefts it into his shoulder, hissing in pain as he does so. Then, with his one good hand, he lifts the bat off the nail, grabbing Lip’s note as well and stuffing it into his pocket.

He doesn’t stop to search the house, to try and pack anything else into his bag. It will only slow him down, and Ian needs to get the hell out of South Side, out of the city. He needs to find his family. He needs to find out what the hell is going on. He needs to help people, if he can.

As he exits the house again, Ian sees the old lady who lives across the street, Mrs. Abramovich, sat on the porch with a shotgun resting across her knees. She smokes a cigarette and watches him walk away with her small, mean eyes. Apparently the Abramoviches aren’t interested in being part of the evacuation.

The streets are mostly deserted as Ian drags himself through them, his injuries weighing him down with exhaustion. In the distance he can hear the wail of sirens and the _pop-pop-pop_ of rapid gunfire - admittedly not uncommon sounds in this neighborhood.

Ian pauses, just for a moment, as he passes the Kash and Grab. The windows are all smashed and the door is hanging loosely from one hinge. There are looters inside, shoving food and water and cigarettes into their pockets and into bags. There’s a dead man in the middle of the street, a bullet hole in his cheek, and Ian remembers Linda’s skill with a gun. Vaguely, he hopes that she and the kids got out of the city OK.

Then, for the first time (really, who could blame him?) Ian wonders where Frank is in all this chaos. Probably passed out in an alley somewhere, completely oblivious. He might be dead, but Ian doubts it. Frank is harder to kill than a cockroach.

Ian doesn’t intend to stop. He intends to keep walking, to hitch a ride or walk all the way out of the city if he has to. But he’s passing by the Alibi when he hears a familiar sound - a sound that sticks his feet to the sidewalk, freezes him in place.

There’s a baby crying inside.

‘Shit,’ Ian mutters. It may have been a while since he last pulled babysitting duty, but there’s something about that cry that strikes him right in his gut.

The doors are all locked, but Ian knows for a fact that there’s a window in the men’s bathroom with a broken lock, so he heads around the back of the building. He drags a dumpster over to the window, climbs on top of it, and forces it open. Old paint and crumbling mold fall down in a shower, but Ian manages to get the window open wide to let him through. He tosses his backpack and baseball bat in, then crawls in after them, splinters scraping his belly.

The wailing is much louder in here. It’s coming from the bar.

Ian picks up the baseball bat again, and grabs the pepper spray from his bag. Slowly, cautiously, he approaches the door of the bathroom, listening the whole time. He can’t hear anyone else in here, and it occurs to him that trying to sneak up on a violent, fiercely protective Russian mother might not be the best plan. Taking a deep breath, Ian calls out softly, ‘Svetlana?’

The only answer is continued wailing.

Ian pushes open the door to the bathroom slowly. ‘Svetlana? It’s Ian. Ian Gallagher. I’m coming out. Please don’t fucking shoot me, OK?’

There are no crazy Russians waiting for him on the other side of the door. The bar is deserted, save for one of those bouncy toddler chairs over in a corner by one of the booths, and in the chair…

‘Yev,’ Ian says, his voice cracking a little. He runs over, drops the baseball bat and the pepper spray and picks the screaming toddler up out of his chair, hugging him close, shushing him, pressing his nose against the top of Yevgeny’s head and breathing in that baby smell of powder and soap and… poop. No wonder Yev was crying. He had a seriously dirty diaper.

Ian casts his eyes around the room, spots a note on the table of the booth. He leans in, tries to read it, but it’s in Russian and he can’t make sense of it.

Yev is screaming right in Ian’s ear, banging his tiny fists against Ian’s chest. Ian holds him tighter, rubs his back. ‘It’s OK, little man,’ he murmurs, not sure if Yev can even hear him over the noise he’s making. ‘I’m here. I’ve got you.’

Gunfire rattles, a few streets away.

After stealing the Alibi away from Kev and Vee, Svetlana had installed a new TV above the bar, and Ian walks over to it, bouncing Yevgeny in his arms. He grabs the remote, switches it on, praying for the TV to tell him what the hell is going on in Chicago.

Here’s what the TV tells him: it’s not just Chicago.

There are breathless reporters being filmed live in New York, in Orlando, in Houston. Ian sees the words _global pandemic_. He sees the word _zombie_ , over and over again. He sees shaky cellphone footage of people with missing limbs and horrible injuries and dead eyes who are somehow still moving. He sees people screaming and fleeing. He sees reports from France, from Canada, from Mexico.

Mexico.

 _It’s like this everywhere_ , Rita had told him. Ian had assumed she meant it was happening all over Chicago, but this was happening everywhere. Including Mexico.

Ian hugs Yevgeny tighter to his chest, panic rising in his throat.

_This is happening everywhere._

Ten minutes later, the power goes out.


	2. Day Five

‘It’s pretty simple, hombre,’ Mickey says, casually pointing an AR-15 at the leader’s chest so the rest of them don’t get any ideas. ‘This was your shit. Now it’s our shit. Comprende?’

‘Fuck you, yankee motherfucker,’ the guy spits, practically shaking with rage. ‘Taking food out of my babies’ mouths…’

‘Shoulda thought of that before you decided you raid us, shouldn’t you? Dumb fuck. Hey, break his jaw for me,’ Mickey calls out to one of his lackeys, who steps forward and obliges with a little help from a tire iron.

As the back-talker lays in the dirt, clutching his smashed face and gurgling, Mickey picks his way over to where his boys are sorting through the contents of the other group’s van. ‘Anything good?’ he asks.

‘Gun. Some snacks. Four bottles of water. About a half-pound of meth.’

Mickey whistles through his teeth, holds the bag up to the sunlight and peers at it. ‘Good stuff.’

Laurence grins, accentuating the scar on his lip. ‘Yeah, man. We’re gonna have some fun.’

‘No you fuckin’ ain’t,’ Mickey says sharply. ‘We’re bartering this, not using it.’

The smile falls from Laurence’s face and his expression turns mutinous. ‘I wanna get high,’ he mutters.

‘Everyone wants to get fucking high, that’s the point. Nothing ups the street value of meth like misery. Keep your hands off it or you’re gonna lose 'em.’

Laurence mutters under his breath, but Mickey knows he won’t dare touch the meth. He’s scraped together three guys for his gang and every one of them is scared of him. There were originally four guys, but one of them started a fight with Mickey and so Mickey killed him to make a point. Then, before the guy came back, Mickey had staked the body to the ground and left the reanimated corpse to dry out in the sun, its teeth snapping stupidly as Mickey and the rest of them walked away.

The three remaining dudes aren’t exactly criminal masterminds. Laurence is a tweaker going through withdrawal symptoms. Miguel is a fisherman who had never committed a crime in his life before he met Mickey, and goes a little green at the sight of blood. Then there’s Jesus, the club bouncer who’s no stranger to cracking skulls, and is happy to do so whenever Mickey asks. Jesus has a strong body and sharp green eyes, and Mickey’s probably going to try to fuck him soon. He needs to let off some steam.

Mickey was better prepared than most when the whole world went to shit a few days ago. While everyone else was losing everything, Mickey had already lost everything. He didn’t have to worry about rounding up family members or collecting precious belongings. He’d just grabbed his gun and a lead pipe and started smashing skulls.

It was fun, like a video game. Once you got over the fact that they were horror movie monsters, the zombies were pretty slow and dumb and no match for a Milkovich. No doubt things were scarier in the cities, where apparently the zombies would gather in thousands and steamroll anyone unlucky enough to get in their way, but Mickey had been hiding out in the sticks, just starting to build up a new career as a drug dealer, when the dead began to rise.

Mickey doesn’t want to admit that he’s doing it on purpose, but they’re heading up towards the border. Sooner or later he knows he’s going to have to come clean with himself, and with his guys - tell them that, yeah, he wants to go home. He wants to go back to Chicago. He wants to see if anyone’s still alive - Kev, Iggy, Mandy, hell, even fucking Svetlana.

‘Adios, assholes! Guess you’ll have to hitchhike from now on,' Mickey calls mockingly over his shoulder to the small huddle of defeated survivors as he climbs into the driver’s seat of the van. Jesus, who seems to be vying for a position as Mickey’s right-hand man (Mickey can think of a few other positions he’d like to put him in), silently calls shotgun while the other two pile into the back.

The would-be raid was at dawn, but now the sun is climbing in the sky. Mickey spots a pair of shades on the dashboard, grabs them and puts them on. They provide cool relief from the glare.

‘Alright. Let’s roll, fuckers,’ he says, and then the wheels are churning up dust.

* * *

Ian is picking his way through what’s left of the Kash and Grab. It isn’t much - mainly shit that no one wants, like detergent, but he finds a bag of lentils shoved towards the back of a bottom shelf and grabs it, throws it in his backpack. He stands up again, continues the hunt, his shoes crunching on broken glass as he walks past the row of empty refrigerator units. He’s reaching for a lone bottle of Gatorade when he spies something in the backroom.

‘Oh, jackpot,’ Ian mutters.

He hurries around to the door, winces at the creak of the hinges when it opens. He’s looking over his shoulder as he heads into the back room, checking to make sure no one’s following him inside.

Which is why he doesn’t see the zombie until it’s too late.

It lurches out from behind a shelf with a rough snarl, and Ian whips around, startled. Already, though, its fingers are at his throat, the paper-thin skin leaving behind dusty marks on Ian’s shirt. Its rotting breath washes over Ian’s face and he gags, tries to recoil.

And then. Then the zombie’s yellow teeth are tearing into Ian’s pale throat. He chokes in shock, tries feebly to push it away, but the creature only bites down harder.

There’s an awful crunching sound. Ian’s eyes go wide as blood spurts up the side of his face, pours down the front of his shirt. He stops fighting back. He falls backwards, crashing to the floor, the back of his head smacking against it with a dull thud, lentils spilling out of his backpack and across the floor. The monster, with bits of Ian’s flesh between its teeth, starts digging its ragged fingernails into his stomach, tearing it open, pulling out his intestines.

Ian doesn’t react. He’s staring up dully at the Kash and Grab’s cracked ceiling tiles. The tension fades from his face and his expression goes slack and fixed. His body is jostled as the zombie tears into his guts, giving the illusion of movement, but Ian is dead, Ian is fucking _dead_ …

Mickey opens his eyes, feels his stomach swoop and automatically rolls over, sticks his head over the side of the bed. He dry-heaves for several long moments, retching, but nothing comes up. His heart is pounding like crazy, sweat sticking his hair to his forehead.

Eventually the danger seems to have passed, so Mickey flops back onto the bed. He can hear Laurence snoring in the room next door. The first tendrils of morning light are creeping through the window of the abandoned house they’re crashing in.

 _It was just a dream_ , Mickey thinks angrily to himself.

Except… it could be true.

He’s heard what it’s like in the cities. People all crammed together with nowhere to run when shit gets bad. Ian’s smart, god he’s so fucking _smart_ , but he’s stupid too. He rushes towards fires and car crashes for a living now. He would have wanted to stay behind, to try and help people. And, like, statistically Ian is probably dead.

Or worse… he’s one of _them_.

Mickey feels this awful tightness in his chest as he imagines Chicago, its streets filled with shuffling zombies, and somewhere among them… a head of red hair. Ian’s eyes dull and dead and unblinking, sinking back into his skull. All that anger and messy emotion gone, with nothing left behind but a body.

And here’s the thing, here’s the worst thing. Either of these scenarios - Ian dead, or Ian undead - they could happen _any_ time and Mickey would have no idea. Like, what if Ian died just now, just a few seconds ago? What if he was taking his last breaths right now?

The thought has haunted Mickey these last few days, cramping up his insides. It’s like there’s a clock ticking down to Ian’s death, but Mickey doesn’t know how much time is left on it, or even if the time is already up.

And shit. Ian is kind of an asshole. He’s broken up with Mickey twice now. He left him at the border after _promising_ to come to Mexico but he gave Mickey all his money and he said “I love you” and he kissed Mickey like his heart was breaking and if Mickey can get back to Chicago before that clock runs out then maybe…

‘Fuck,’ Mickey says aloud in a tone of disgust. He grabs his packet of cigarettes, slides one between his lips and lights it, taking a deep drag.

There’s no point in denying it. He’s chasing after Ian Gallagher again. He’s probably going to Chicago to find a corpse, or nothing at all. Just a question that won't ever be answered.

But then again, Mickey could be going to Chicago to find Ian whole and healthy and alive. He could get to kiss Ian again, to hear his voice again, to fall asleep next to him again. He could keep Ian alive, get them through this together. And no matter how unlikely that is, it’s all Mickey has left.


	3. Day Two

Ian waits at the Alibi all night. Part of him is screaming to just grab Yevgeny and make a break for the evacuation center - fuck Svetlana for leaving the kid alone in the first place. But after he waits for a few hours, he realizes that the sun is setting and he would have to make the journey in the dark, with monsters all around hunting for someone to chew on. Bedding down in one of the booths for the night seems like the better option.

In the morning, Ian takes a quick inventory of the contents of Yev’s diaper bag, which he found stashed under the table. There’s enough food to last Yev maybe two or three days - rusks and little bags of cereal and carrot sticks and pots of yoghurt. Throw in Ian’s Pop Tarts and apples and that can stretch to five days (Ian can ration the jerky for himself, since it’s too tough for Yev’s half-dozen tiny teeth). After changing Yev’s stinky diaper twice, Ian has eight diapers left before he needs to get creative.

So, he has more than enough supplies to make the journey to the I-88 camp. Actually getting there, though… that could be a challenge.

Throughout the night, Ian kept getting woken up by the snarls and dragging feet of zombies passing by in the street outside, and by smatterings of gunfire. More than once Yev had woken up too, and there had been a heart-pounding moment when he started crying while the zombies were right outside. Ian had hid under the table, desperately shushing the infant, listening to cold hands batting curiously at the window shutter. Eventually the zombie had moved on, but Ian knows that next time he might not be so lucky.

In the cool, thin morning light filtering through the shutters, Ian is sitting at a booth feeding Yevgeny cereal, the toddler smacking his lips messily so that milk runs down his chin and drips onto his shirt. The kid has these big blue eyes that are so familiar they make Ian’s chest ache. Mickey always scoffed at Svetlana’s insistence that Yevgeny was definitely his son, pointing out the many other guys she banged, but Ian knows the truth. He would know those eyes anywhere.

It’s weird, OK. Yev isn’t his son, isn’t related to Ian in any way, but Ian loves him. Always has, really, ever since Svetlana burst into the Gallagher household holding the newborn baby in her arms and yelling at Mickey to come home. Ian had dropped round the Milkovich house later with some of Liam’s old clothes, and yeah he’d been manic at the time, but that need to take care of Mickey’s kid had been absolutely real.

Maybe Ian hadn’t really been there for Yev as much after Mickey got locked up, but for a while he’d had three parents to look after him and Ian hadn’t really been needed. Now, though… now Ian might be the only person Yev has left.

‘Alright, tough guy,’ Ian sighs at last, standing up. His heart breaks a little when Yev stares up at him and then spreads his arms wide, making grabby hands, his face crumpling a little. Ian picks him up and looks around the bar while Yev grabs his cheek and yanks on it. Ian’s already gathered up all the food he could find, plus a few other bits and pieces - the batteries from the TV remote, a couple of plastic lighters, a screwdriver - but he doesn’t want to be too weighed down. The plan is to hotwire a car, drive out of the city, but Ian isn’t so naive as to think that he won’t have to do some running.

‘Bah!’ Yev shrieks, tugging harder on Ian’s cheek.

‘Shhh, you gotta be quieter than that, little man,’ Ian says, bouncing Yev a little on his arm as he grabs the diaper bag (where he’s transferred all his stuff) and slinging it over his shoulder. He grabs the baseball bat, too, though he knows that with both Yev and the bag his ability to fight will be limited.

The alley behind the Alibi is empty when Ian unlocks the back door and slips outside, but glancing towards the street he can see swaying, bloodstained figures slowly milling around - one, two, three… _fuck_. There are a lot of them. Ian needs to…

‘Bah!’ Yevgeny screams again, louder this time, a big grin splitting his chubby face. Ian winces, sees the zombies turn their heads, stare into the alley. He whips his head around, looks down the other end and… yep, the creatures are gathering there as well.

And they’re moving in.

‘God damn it,’ Ian mutters. He hurries back inside the Alibi, bolts the door behind him. As he’s glancing around the bar, trying to figure out his next strategy, he hears hands slapping against the back door, then banging, and a chorus of snarls. _Shit_ , that’s going to attract more of them.

Ian hefts Yevgeny up, holds him out at arm’s length and glares at him.

‘You’re definitely a Milkovich,’ he says sternly. ‘You’re already getting me in trouble.’

Yev thinks it’s a game, lets out a happy squeal, kicking his dangling legs.

Hurriedly hugging the toddler in close again, Ian heads for the front door. He’ll be more exposed there, but he’ll also have more directions to run in. He slides the big, heavy bolts back, wincing at the soft screech of metal-on-metal, and pulls the door open a crack, peering out.

Shit.

Chicago’s South Side isn’t the prettiest neighborhood at the best of times, but in the cold light of day the devastation of the outbreak is clear. Every ground floor window in sight is smashed. The street is littered with bodies, and the stench rolling off them makes Ian retch. There’s trash scattered everywhere, graffiti, dropped bags full of scattered possessions and, oh yeah…

Fucking zombies.

Ian counts five, ten, twenty of the things in sight. They haven’t spotted him yet, thank fuck, and some of them are heading towards the alley, attracted by the noise.

Ian can see a car down the street. About fifty yards away.

‘Fuck,’ Ian mutters, his heart pounding. His gaze darts from zombie to zombie, trying to find a safe path. There isn’t one, but if he moves fast, if he zig-zags…

There’s a loud crash as the back door of the Alibi gives way, and Ian hears the creatures pouring into the building behind, a clamor of animalistic sounds and heavy footsteps.

‘Fuck it,’ he says, steeling himself, tightening his grip on the baseball bat. ‘Hold on, Yev.’

He takes off, and immediately realizes that running with a toddler on his hip and a bag on his shoulder is a lot harder than he anticipated. This isn’t the first time that Ian has tried to sprint while holding Yevgeny, but the kid’s a lot bigger now and Ian isn’t powered by the wild, unstoppable, uncaring energy that his manic phases bring on.

He makes it about ten paces before one of the zombies lurches towards him, snapping its teeth, and Ian has to veer wildly away, almost losing his balance. He runs, runs as fast as he can, the bag bouncing against his hip painfully and Yev making loud noises of complaint in his arms. The car is forty yards away, thirty…

A zombie launches itself at him, snags Ian’s EMT jacket with its horrible claws. He wheels around, trying to shake it loose, finds himself face to face with the thing and nearly loses his breakfast. Its eyes are cloudy, too much of the eyeball exposed, sunk into a yellowing, snarling face. It smells foul: the cold, dusty rot of its lungs expelled into Ian’s face with every guttural bark. And worst of all, it looks familiar. This isn’t someone Ian knows well, but he’s seem them around the neighborhood plenty of times.

Yevgeny wails in displeasure, tightens his fists in the lapel of Ian’s jacket.

‘ _Fuck off!_ ’ Ian yells at the creature. He can sense more of them closing in from behind. He tries to yank his arm free of that horrible grip and, when that doesn’t work, he kicks out viciously, his foot connecting with the zombie’s knee cap.

It doesn’t seem to feel pain, but the impact knocks it off balance and Ian finds his arm freed up. Not wasting any time, he swings the baseball bat around and smashes it against the zombie’s skull. It staggers backwards and Ian sees a crack in its scalp, black blood slowly oozing out.

Bony, stinking hands grab at his shoulders, grab at Yev.

‘No!’ Ian yells, throwing an elbow backwards tearing himself free of the monsters behind him, staggering and almost falling before he rights himself and starts running. There’s a mob of them gathering - he can hear them - but Ian doesn’t stop. The car is twenty yards away, fifteen…

A zombie staggers towards him and Ian doesn’t hesitate, brings the baseball bat up and smashes it in the underside of its jaw, snapping its head up, knocking it backwards in a clumsy stumble. Ian doesn’t stop to see if it falls. He just keeps running.

The car is ten yards away now, five…

Ian crashes into the side of it, yanks on the handle of the driver seat door desperately. It’s locked. Of course it’s fucking locked. Ian is swearing loudly, sweat dripping into his eyes. There’s no time for finesse. The zombies are close behind. Ian brings the baseball bat around in a heavy swing, shatters the window, glass spraying everywhere.

Yevgeny has stopped thinking this is fun. He’s screaming now, his face bright red, snot and tears dripping down his face, but there’s no time to comfort him. Ian reaches in and unlocks the door from the inside, opens it, throws the bag in the back and shoves Yev onto the floor underneath the passenger seat before climbing in behind the wheel and slamming the door behind him. Not that it will do him much good with the window broken.

Fortunately, most people who live in the South Side drive shitty old cars, and this car is no exception. Ian rips the screwdriver he found in the Alibi out of his pocket.

The zombies have reached the car. One of them pushes its head and arms through the window, its teeth snapping together inches from Ian’s face. A wordless, furious yell escapes him and he brings the screwdriver around, jams it right into the fucking thing’s eye socket.

The smell is horrifying, but the creature goes limp almost immediately, its arms dropping into Ian’s lap, its body curving over in a slump through the window. There are more of them massing behind it, but the first one is blocking them a little.

Yevgeny is screaming, screaming, the sound piercing Ian’s skull. The zombies are at the passenger side window now, banging their horrible hands against it. Ian yanks the screwdriver back, retching at the smell and the burst of putrid fluids that follow it, then slams the screwdriver point first into the ignition, banging it in with the heel of his hand. Using all his strength, he turns it, feels the car resist a first, then…

The engine chokes, sputters, dies.

‘Come on you fucking bitch, you _bitch!_ ’ Ian spits, slamming his free hand furiously against the steering wheel.

The passenger side window shatters under the weight pressed against it. Yevgeny’s shrieking somehow reaches an even higher pitch as grey arms come reaching through, followed by a head with hair flaking from its stretched scalp.

‘Fuck you!’ Ian yells furiously, turning the screwdriver in the ignition again, nearly insane with frustration as he listens to the engine wheeze briefly into life and then die once again. ‘Fucking leave him alone, don’t you touch him!’

He slams his free fist into the zombie’s horrible, gaunt face, briefly knocking it back through the window, but it’s back in a moment, reaching for Yevgeny. Its bony fingers brush the toddler’s cheek and Yevgeny stares up at it, his screams momentarily stymied by hiccups and a snot bubble. Ian is out of his mind with panic. The thing’s going to get Yev, it’s going to kill Mickey’s son and it’s all Ian’s fault…

Ian turns the ignition. Pumps the accelerator. The engine finally roars into life.

With a wordless yell of triumph, Ian peels out, dragging the car from the massive horde that has gathered around it. He changes gears, pushes the accelerator right to the floor, hears the tires screech in protest as the car picks up speed. The dead zombie hanging through his window slides out and thuds under the wheels of the car, but the other one hangs on, grips the frame of the passenger side door in a deathly tight grasp, tries to drag itself into the car.

'Oh, fuck  _off!’_ Ian yells. There’s a corner coming up and he spins the wheel, turning sharply, throwing the monster back. Yev is thrown around by the motion, bumps his head on the floor, starts yelling again. The cries seem to spur the zombie on and it pulls itself back through the window.

Furiously, Ian rips the screwdriver out of the ignition, throws it from one hand to the other, leans over and stabs it at the thing’s face. It tears through the zombie’s cheek, flaying it open to the bone, but the creature seems undeterred. It snaps its teeth at Ian’s arm, nearly biting him.

Ian takes another sharp turn. Thank god no one else is on the road right now. This time, when the zombie is thrown back, he stabs at its hands with the screwdriver, cutting red divots in its pallid flesh. The angle is awful and Ian has no good leverage to swing and he’s distracted by trying not to crash the car but he keeps stabbing, stabbing, stabbing, until one hand falls away.

He can hear the zombie’s body bumping on the asphalt as it’s dragged along by the car.

Ian slams the screwdriver down one more time, severing the zombie’s index finger. It tumbles onto the floor, rolls near Yevgeny, but it does the trick. There’s a loud thud and Ian feels the weight fall away from the car, glances in the rear view mirror and sees the zombie tumbling over and over and over on the road as they leave it behind.

‘Ha!’ Ian yells, grinning wildly. He sticks his head out the window, yells into the backdraft, ‘Bye bye, motherfucker!’

He eases off the accelerator a little, tries to figure out the best way out of the city. He drives past Marquette Park. It’s teeming with monsters. He passes a small group of men and women who yell when they spot him and chase after the car, but Ian doesn’t stop. He can’t take the risk, not with Yev.

Poor Yev. He seems to have cried himself into a state of exhaustion and is curled up on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Even at a glance, Ian can see that the kid is bleeding - cuts from the broken glass - but he can’t see how bad it is. He needs to stop, needs to check Yev over, but he can’t do it until he’s clear of the city.

It seems to take forever to get out of Chicago. Ian has to stay on the lookout for blocked roads, for attackers, for zombies, but he can hear Yev snuffling quietly and suddenly he misses the screaming. The screaming meant that Yev was OK.

Finally, Ian pulls out onto the I-88 with its eight wide lanes. The zombies seem to go from surrounding him on all sides to being eerily absent. Ian carefully steers around a toppled tanker with a dead body hanging out of the cab window. Buildings give way to grassy banks and flat scrublands on both sides, and eventually Ian decides that it’s safe to stop for a moment.

He rolls the car to an easy stop on the hard shoulder, keeps the engine running, then reaches over and picks Yev up off the floor, hugs him desperately tight. Then Ian sits the kid in his lap, checks him for injuries. There’s a nasty bump on his head, little cuts on his hands that will need cleaning, but nothing too worrying.

Yev’s head droops wearily, his bottom lip wobbling, his cheeks bright red, breathing snuffly breaths through his snotty nose. Ian brushes his hand over the kid’s head, the soft blond hair matted down with sweat, and holds his little hand gently.

‘I’m sorry, Yev,’ he says, guilt eating at him, despair creeping up on him.

The little boy whimpers miserably, wraps his fingers around Ian’s thumb. He’s got a strong grip already, and his sturdy little body is heavy on Ian’s knees.

Suddenly, Ian misses Mickey so much that it hits him like a physical pain in his chest. He wishes so much that Mickey was here, that Mickey had been there to beat the zombies away from his son while Ian drove the car. Ian can’t do this by himself. He’s going to get Yev killed. He’s going to get himself killed.

‘Mah,’ Yev snuffles wetly. ‘Ma-mah.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ian repeats. Poor fucking kid. ‘I don’t know where she is.’

Yev just stares at him. He doesn’t get it. His lower lip is sticking out in a big sad pout.

Ian mentally pulls himself together. He can’t sit here feeling sorry for himself. He needs to find his family. Shifting Yev back into the passenger seat, Ian pulls the seatbelt down over his lap, clicks it into place.

‘Come on, little man,’ he says, pulling back out onto the road. ‘Let’s ride.’


	4. Day Eight

Mickey stands on the roof of the van, chewing the inside of his lip thoughtfully as he surveys the border fence and the crossing… which is absolutely teeming with zombies. Another group has obviously tried to pass through here recently, because he can see fresh blood on the ground and huddles of the creatures squatting down, feasting like hyenas.

‘Man, they should have hired zombies earlier. Pretty effective way of keeping you spics out, huh?’ he says, grinning down at his small band of survivors. They look back up at him, stone-faced. Tough crowd.

‘We ain’t getting through that, Mickey,’ Jesus says, leaning on the side of the van.

‘Sure we are. We can just build up some speed and drive right through ‘em.’

‘And what if we crash?’ Laurence demands. ‘They’ll be all over us, man.’

‘I don’t even friggin’ want to cross the border,’ Miguel mumbles. ‘Don’t see the point.’

‘The point, dumbass, is to get up to Chicago,’ Mickey snaps.

‘Why would we want to go to Chicago?’

‘Because I want to go to Chicago, and you want to be around someone who knows what the fuck he’s doing. You want to wander off into the desert and get eaten, be my fucking guest.’

Laurence looks at the ground sulkily and Miguel mumbles something else under his breath, but neither of them make a move to leave. Jesus, however, is still eyeing the zombies with a calculating expression

‘We can’t drive through them, Mickey,’ he repeats. ‘You ever hit a speed bump going too fast? Imagine that fifty times in a row. We won’t make it.’

Mickey scowls fiercely, but he knows the guy has a point. ‘Fine, so we shoot the fuckers,’ he says.

‘Running low on ammo,’ Laurence points out.’

‘You do not get to fucking tell me we’re running low on ammo,’ Mickey bites out. ‘Not after all those Uzi rounds you wasted trying to shoot a fucking coyote.’

‘I was trying to get us food!’

‘Well you fucking didn’t! Because, moron, that coyote was half a mile away and the Uzi is not a precision weapon.’

‘Mickey,’ Jesus says, lifting his chin in the direction of the border. ‘They’re headed this way.’

Mickey looks over and shit, Jesus is right. Their yelling has attracted the attention of the zombies, and as they gather together as a horde it becomes clear just how great their numbers are.

‘We gotta move, man,’ Laurence says, his voice going high-pitched with panic.

‘Alright, fine,’ Mickey sighs, jumping down from the roof.

‘Let’s drive a little more along the border,’ Miguel pleads. ‘See if there’s a better place to cross.’

‘Yeah, yeah, OK.’ Mickey climbs into the driver’s seat of the van, Jesus beside him as usual, Miguel and Laurence jumping in the back. He turns the engine over.

Jesus is eyeing him shrewdly. ‘Mickey,’ he says. ‘We gotta find another way across.’

Mickey watches the approaching zombies. ‘Uh-huh,’ he says. ‘Put your seatbelt on.’

He hears Jesus swear softly under his breath, then comply. To the two in the back Mickey calls out, ‘Hold onto something.’

He sees Laurence’s panicked eyes in the rear view mirror, hears him yell, ‘Mickey _don’t!’_

Mickey slams the accelerator right to the fucking floor.

Miguel didn’t take Mickey’s advice and gets thrown against the back of the ban with a loud thud, but Mickey is too focused on the road ahead to pay attention to that. He sucks in air through his teeth as they approach the zombie horde, and then…

 _Bang_ …

The first monster bounces off the windshield, leaving a crack and a smear of blood and jolting everyone forward as the van loses some speed. Mickey curses loudly and begins steering wildly, side-swiping the zombies instead of hitting them head on. _Bang. Bang. Bang-bang_. Their snarls become a cacophony outside as Mickey ploughs through them.

They’re not at the border yet and there’s already steam pouring out of the front of the van, obscuring Mickey’s view. The engine is starting to wheeze in protest and despite Mickey keeping the accelerator pressed to the floor they’ve lost a lot of speed. A couple more zombies smash into the front of the van and the cracks on the windshield spread.

‘Mickey what the fuuuuck,’ Laurence moans from the back.

‘Shut the fuck up!’ Mickey winds down his window, ignoring the grey arms that come reaching in and then slide away behind the van. He pulls his gun out of his pocket and begins firing wildly ahead of the van. Only about half of the hits land, and most of them don’t do much good, barely causing the zombies to flinch. But they’re at the border now, they’re so close…

Mickey feels it when the van takes a spin that it won’t recover from. They’re past the border fence, but they’re sliding sideways now. The van teeters on two wheels, threatening to tip, and then it goes, the momentum carrying it over again so that it lands on its roof and then stays there, rocking.

Fuck.

There’s no time to lose, and no time to stick around to help the others. It’s every man for himself. Mickey drags himself out through the shattered windshield, broken glass stabbing into his palms and slicing at his belly, and there to greet him on the other side is a sea of shrivelled, rotting arms, a chorus of snarls. He lifts his gun, shoots a zombie right between the eyes, and it falls onto his legs. Teeth snap at his arm and he lashes out furiously with his fists, all the while scrambling to get away.

Suddenly, the zombies attacking him are collapsing, one by one, and Mickey’s ears are ringing from the sound of a shotgun blast. He looks over and sees Jesus, bloody teeth bared, firing at the heads of the zombies attacking Mickey. It’s just enough to give him an opening and Mickey scrambles to his feet, staggers, runs from the horde.

He hears desperate screams and looks back to see zombies crawling inside the van, where poor Laurence and Miguel weren’t able to get out in time. The AR-15 is still in there as well, and all of their food and water. Mickey curses under his breath.

‘I told you we weren’t going to make it,’ Jesus pants, falling into a run next to Mickey.

Mickey shakes blood from his eyes angrily. ‘We fucking made it, alright. Some of us.’ He slows from a run to a jog to a walk. They’ve left the zombies some way behind now. Those fuckers don’t move fast.

Jesus looks back over his shoulder, breathing heavily. ‘You must want to get to Chicago real fucking bad.’

Mickey thinks about a shock of red hair, about pale skin against dirty sheets, about a firm hand grasping the back of his neck. A ticking clock.

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I got family there.’

Jesus nods. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I got family too.’

The shotgun stock slams into Mickey’s temple.

He’s on the ground. There’s a ringing in his ears.

Jesus is fishing the gun out of his pocket. Mickey feebly tries to stop him, fails.

‘Sorry, man. You’re gonna get me killed.’

A boot slams into his stomach. It pulls back again, then smashes into Mickey’s face, knocking his head backwards viciously. Mickey coughs blood, groans.

Time goes weird for a while. He vaguely watches Jesus walking away, the shotgun held across his body. Mickey rolls over a little, squints into the sun, then lets his head loll over to look back at the border. A lot of the zombies are distracted by the crashed van, but there are a few heading this way.

Mickey can’t quite summon up the energy to move. The world’s gone to shit. He has no weapons, no food, no water. Ian is probably dead, and even if he is alive Mickey will probably never find him. Why keep fighting? Why not just give up right here?

_Because I’m fucking pissed, that’s why._

He grits his teeth, feeling blood spill through the spaces between them and over his lips. Clutching his bruised ribs with one hand, Mickey uses the other to lever himself up off the ground, onto his hands and knees.

The snarling is getting closer.

Mickey looks up. One of the zombies is ahead of the pack, closing in on him, its mean eyes fixed on him. One of its arms is hanging low, loose at the socket where it’s been partially ripped out, but the other one is outstretched. The thing already has its revolting mouth open wide in anticipation.

Mickey curls his body into itself, drags himself into a standing position. A wave of dizziness almost overcomes him, a roaring in his ears like the sound of the ocean, but he beats it back with sheer willpower.

‘C’mon,’ he mumbles drunkenly. ‘C’mon, fucker. Come get it.’

A fresh snarl rips its way from the zombie’s throat as it launches itself at Mickey, its frayed fingertips scrabbling at his face. Unintimidated, he snaps forward and headbutts the fucking thing right in its rotten face. It staggers backwards, black fluid oozing slowly from its nose, and Mickey takes the opportunity to grab its loose arm, plant a foot in its stomach and pull _hard_.

With a horrible sucking noise, the arm rips right out of the socket, leaving behind an empty sleeve. The zombie barely seems to notice, but at least now Mickey is armed. Heh. Armed.

He swings the arm hard at the zombie’s head. It bends at the elbow, taking some of the power out of the swing, but still hits hard enough to make the monster stagger, then slowly topple over and fall to the ground in a clumsy heap. Mickey throws the arm to the ground and stamps on it so that the forearm snaps off, leaving behind two shards of protruding bone.

He rips it free, staggers over and straddles the zombie, then stabs the sharp bits of bone down into its ugly face.

It takes a few good blows before his makeshift weapon penetrates the skull via one of the eyesockets and hits the thing’s brain. When that happens, it instantly goes limp underneath him. Mickey falls back, panting, and throws the torn off arm away from him.

He can already see, out of the corner of his eye, more zombies getting closer. He hurts in a dozen different places, and he’s covered in his own blood and horrible stuff that spilled out of the zombie. But Mickey is alive. He bares his teeth in an animalistic grin, drags himself to his feet, and glares at the ongoing tide of zombies.

‘Fuck you!’ he yells hoarsely. ‘You’re fucking dead! You’re dead!’

Yeah, not his best line, but fuck it.

Mickey turns away from them and, still clutching his ribs, continues the long journey North.


	5. Day Two, Part Two

After the chaos of the city and miles of empty road, it’s something of a shock when Ian reaches the evacuation center - a repurposed high school - and finds… civilization. Tanks and military jeeps and cops. Man, he never thought he would actually be happy to see the cops.

Fencing has hastily been set up around the high school and people are massing outside. There must be at least a thousand of them - clutching suitcases and children and yelling at the harassed soldiers standing at the checkpoint. It looks like people are being given a medical examination before being let in - white-coated doctors shining lights in people’s eyes and checking their bodies for bite marks.

Ian grabs Yevgeny and the bag and climbs out of the car, which is looking pretty trashed - windows broken, streaks of blood on the outside. Hefting Yev a little higher up his body, he walks to the back of the thronging crowd, stands on his tiptoes, tries to see what’s going on. Yev, exhausted, lets his head loll against Ian’s shoulder.

It soon becomes clear that they’re going way too fucking slowly. At this rate, there’s no way, Ian’s getting into the camp before nightfall. Looking around, he hurries over to the nearest soldier, who is surveying the crowd with a rifle in his hands and a dispassionate expression on his face.

‘Hey,’ Ian says. ‘I need to get in there. I have a kid.’

The soldier looks at him with a neutral expression. ‘Get back in line, sir,’ he says.

‘What line?’ Ian counters, looking at the disordered mass of people. ‘It’s fucking chaos. My kid…’

‘A lot of people have kids. Get back in line, sir.’

‘What’s the point of doing these tests anyway?’ Ian persists. ‘I’ve seen how fast people turn into those things. If someone’s infected, you’ll know.’

‘Sir.’ The soldier flexes his fingers on the stock of his rifle. ‘I won’t ask you again.’

Ian’s lip curls in disgust. ‘You’re a real fucking credit to your country, you know that?’

The soldier takes a threatening step forward. Yev whimpers miserably into Ian’s shoulder, and reluctantly he steps back. He pats the toddler gently on the back.

‘Shhh, I know buddy. It’s OK.’

The wait to get inside is agonizingly slow, and new people are arriving behind Ian, crushing him and Yev into the crowd. At one point the soldiers seem to realize that the situation is out of control, and people are ordered to line up against the fencing. Ian bounces Yev in his arms, tries to soothe him even amid the cacophany of wails and pleas from the displaced Chicago residents. He sees people with injuries, old people being carried by their relatives, and feels a burning urge to try and help them… but he would need to put down Yevgeny, and he can’t do that.

‘Ian?’

He looks up sharply, looks around.

‘Oh my god, _Ian_. Guys, Ian’s here! Ian’s here!’

Fiona crashes into the fence, on the other side, her fingers slipping through the mesh. Her hair and eyes are wild, and there’s dirt smudged on her face, but she looks overjoyed to see him.

‘Fiona,’ Ian says, his eyes suddenly prickling with how happy he is to see her. With the arm that isn’t holding Yevgeny, he reaches out and covers her fingers with his own.

‘Jesus fucking Christ, man, you made it.’ Lip’s there now, holding Liam in his arms, grinning from ear to ear. There’s a huge bruise on the side of his face but otherwise he looks OK, and then Debbie’s there too, holding Franny. They all fucking made it. Except...

‘Carl,’ Ian says immediately. ‘Have you heard anything about Carl?’

Fiona shakes her head, tears threatening to spill over as she clenches her jaw. ‘We haven’t heard anything. It all went down so fast…’

Ian squeezes her fingers comfortingly. ‘He’ll be OK. Probably having the time of his life killing zombies, right?’

Fiona laughs tearfully, then for the first time seems to notice the toddler in Ian’s arms. She frowns. ‘Is that…?’

_‘Yevgeny!’_

Suddenly Fiona is practically knocked down by Svetlana, who for some reason has burn marks all over her clothes, and is pressed up against the fence, trying impotently to reach through to her son.

Yev lifts his head at the sound of her voice, flings out his arms, nearly dislodging himself from Ian’s hold. ‘Ma-maaah!’ he wails.

Svetlana sobs, starts speaking to him in rapid-fire Russian, cooing comforting words at him.

‘How the hell did you end up with Yevgeny?’ Lip asks over the chatter.

‘Found him in the Alibi, all alone,’ Ian explains.

Svetlana ceases her babbling for a moment, looks up with a gaze so furious that Ian nearly takes a step back. ‘Nika was not with him?’

Ian shakes his head. ‘There was a note…’

Svetlana doesn’t wait to hear any more. She explodes into a burst of Russian that includes a lot of words that sound familiar, from the times when Mickey would piss her off (which happened often). Finally, when she’s cooled off a little, she says, ‘I was uptown when shit went down. Nika was supposed to be watching him. I tried to get back but these-’ she spits another familiar-sounding curse word, glaring at the soldiers ‘-took me out of the city, wouldn’t let me back in.’

Ian holds Yev up to the fence, lets Svetlana hook her fingers through to hold his hands while he talks to Lip. ‘I’m trying to get in there, man, but this line is moving so slow. They’re giving people full check-ups and it’s taking forever.’

Lip scratches the back of his head, looks up the line. ‘Can you hop the fence?’ he asks.

Ian looks up. There’s razor wire mounted on the top. ‘Not unless I want to get shredded. Don’t suppose you got any bolt cutters so we can cut a hole?’

Lip grins wryly. ‘Sorry, I left the bolt cutters at home.’

‘Tell them you’re an EMT,’ Debbie suggests. ‘They might let you cut the line, so you can help people.’

‘I’m wearing my jacket,’ Ian sighs. 'I could try but I think if they were desperate for EMTs…’

He’s cut off by a piercing scream, coming from inside the evacuation center. He frowns, tries to peer over the crowd inside.

‘What’s…’ Fiona begins, and then suddenly she and the others are pushed against the fence by a surge in the crowd. Franny starts wailing in Debbie’s arms and Lip angrily pushes back, while Svetlana tries desperately to cling onto Yev’s hands. The fence rattles violently.

A surge of dread rising inside him, Ian sees a wave in the crowd inside the fence. There are people running, falling over, screaming. And on the wind he hears the unmistakable sound of guttural, undead snarls.

‘You guys gotta get out of there,’ he says urgently. ‘They’re in there, they’re in there with you.’

People around him overhear, on both sides of the fence, and a chorus of panicked cries break out. Inside, people start grabbing at the mesh of the fence, pulling and pushing on it, and Ian hastily hugs Yev close to his chest. On his side of the fence people are pulling away, fleeing, but Ian lingers.

There’s a rattle of gunfire inside. Debbie screams. Fiona uses her body as a shield, trying to protect the rest of the family.

‘You gotta take down that fence!’ Ian yells. ‘If everyone pushes at the same time…’

Another rattle of gunfire. The snarls are getting closer. The crowd surges against the fence, and Ian falls backwards.

‘Ian!’ Fiona says urgently. ‘If we get separated, meet back at the house, OK? When things settle down. Even if it takes weeks, months… find a way to get back to Chicago, get back to the house.’

No. This can’t be happening. Ian just found his family again. He can’t lose them so soon, he can’t let them get separated.

‘Orange boy!’ Svetlana hisses, pressed up against the fence, her eyes blazing. ‘You keep my Yevgeny safe. If anything happens to him, I cut your balls off.’

Yevgeny is crying again, the sound deafening, but Ian nods.

The fence creaks ominously, sways. Ian is the only person still left on this side of it.

‘Ian, you need to get away from the fence,’ Lip insists, wincing as the pressure from the crowd crushes him against it.

‘Fuck, _no,_ Lip.’ Ian’s eyes are welling up with tears. He presses his hand against the fence, wishing he could reach through it, pull his brother through.

‘Ian, listen to me. We’ll see each other again but you gotta _go.’_

Fiona’s nodding frantically, her face contorted with pain as she tries to hold back the crowd behind them. ‘We love you, Ian,’ she says, meeting his eye. ‘Now get the _fuck_ out of here.’

‘Shit.’ Ian dashes his free hand across his eyes, wiping away the tears reluctantly backs away from the fence. ‘I’ll find you!’ he says, walking backwards, hugging Yevgeny close. Then he’s caught up in the tide of fleeing people, has to go with the flow or risk getting knocked down. He sees people go down, trampled underfoot, and he clutches Yev tighter.

As the crowd reaches the road, they pass Ian’s stolen car, now trashed by the passing crowd and by people clambering over it. Ian looks back, sees the fence of the evacuation center topple, sees people surging over it. He wants to go back, to try and find his family, but it would be suicide in this mob. Instead he grits his teeth, lowers his head and runs.

The crowd grows less thick as people scatter. He sees people pleading with the soldiers for help, but they’re ignored as the army rushes towards the camp, guns raised. Something deep inside of Ian still wishes that he was one of them. Back when he was a kid, this was exactly the kind of thing that he dreamed of doing: rushing in to be the big hero. OK, maybe zombies hadn’t really factored into that fantasy, but the drive to help people - to be the person that people turned to when things got scary - was as strong as ever.

Yevgeny whines against Ian’s throat, his little hands holding on tight to Ian’s jacket.

Ian swallows. Fuck. Maybe he can’t be a soldier. Maybe he can’t even be an EMT right now. But he knows that there’s one person in the world who’s depending on him, and he needs to step up. He needs to be a hero for Yevgeny. He needs to keep this poor little boy alive in all of this.

‘It’s OK, Yev,’ he says, hugging the kid close as he jogs away from the chaos of the evacuation. ‘I got you.’

He breaks away from the crowd, leaves the road and starts to cross a field, eyes set on a patch of woodland ahead. In a time like this, people are going to be just as dangerous as the zombies. He needs to find somewhere quiet to take a proper look at Yev’s cuts, needs to find somewhere where they can bed down tonight. He needs to find more food, a decent weapon. He…

He wishes he’d gone with Mickey.

Fuck. Ian had chosen to go back to Chicago for the sake of stability and he’d gotten… what? Three months of it, before everything went to shit. Now… now Mickey could be dead. He was tough as hell, but even the toughest people died in wars, and that’s what this was - a war. Living against dead. Which side was Mickey on now?

Ian breaks through the treeline, trudges through dead leaves. He’s exhausted, hurts all over: from falling out of the ambulance, from a sleepless night spent in the Alibi, from fighting off zombies and being crushed in the crowd. Worse still, he’s almost out of his meds, and once he stops taking them he’s going to get sick again. How can he look after Yev if he’s sick?

‘Ma-mah,’ Yev sniffles, wiping snot and tears on Ian’s neck as he turns his head wearily.

Ian feels his eyes well up again, blinks them back angrily and drops a kiss on the top of Yev’s head, rubs his back. Mickey isn’t here. Wishes and regret won’t make him magically reappear. Ian can’t afford to feel sorry for himself, not when Yev is depending on him.

He breaks through the other side of the trees and finds himself in one of the small towns outside Chicago. The streets are deserted, save for the odd zombie wandering aimlessly in circles, but this place looks less trashed than Chicago. Maybe it’s not so bad out here. Maybe Ian can find a place for them to settle down for the night. Maybe longer. Maybe.

He hefts the bag up higher on his shoulder, steels himself, then starts walking again - a lone living figure in the ghost town.


	6. Day Sixty-Eight

_Thwack._

The zombie topples over, propelled by the force of the crossbow bolt that just slammed into the back of its skull, and lands face-first in an oily puddle on the asphalt. Mickey runs forward, near-silently, and draws the bolt out - being careful not to snap it. He can reuse these, but sooner or later they all snap and he doesn’t have many left now.

Quickly, efficiently, he searches the zombie’s pockets. A pack of cigarettes in the back left pocket of its jeans; a handful of dollars and a mostly-empty bag of trail mix in its zipped-up jacket pocket. Mickey stashes the smokes in his backpack reverently, tosses the useless money aside, and hungrily crams the trail mix into his mouth. It’s shrivelled and stale, but it’s precious calories nonetheless.

That taken care of, Mickey eyes the jacket critically. It’s newer than the one he’s wearing, looks warmer too, and the temperature’s dropping. He makes a decision, shrugs off his current jacket and pulls on the new one, leaving the rejected item of clothing abandoned on the ground. The only clothes he carries are the ones on his back.

It’s been a long fucking road to get here. He thought he would be able to drive most of the way, but working cars quickly grew scarce and fuel even scarcer. Mickey hasn’t spoken to another human in weeks except to threaten them, and he catches a glimpse of his reflection in the puddle.

He looks like an animal.

Realistically, he doesn’t look much worse than he did in his teenage years: greasy hair, grubby clothes, filthy chewed-down fingernails. But now the stubble on his face makes him look older, more dangerous. And Mickey thinks like an animal now, behaves like one. Everything he encounters, he asks himself, _will this kill me or keep me alive?_ That’s all that matters now.

The zombie outside taken care of, Mickey eyes the gas station cautiously, lifting the crossbow to his shoulder as he prowls closer to it. He pauses when he reaches the door, listening. Then, when he doesn’t hear anything, he kicks the door hard with his boot, making it rattle loudly in its frame.

Silence.

The place must be empty. The zombies are drawn by noise, and if there were any in there then that racket would have drawn them in.

Eager to see what he can find, Mickey heads into the gas station, checking all the corners just in case. It’s been ransacked - probably many times by this point, but not by people who are as desperate as Mickey. He spies some cornflakes spilled on the floor and crouches down, carefully scoops them into his palm, tips his head back and drops them into his mouth. They’re soft and chewy from exposure and the damp of the rain. Mickey doesn’t care.

He proceeds around the gas station like that: scraping the blue sugar crystals from the bottom of the slushie machine; chasing the last mouthful of beer out of a crushed can; getting down on the floor to look under the shelves and finding a lone dog biscuit, which he dusts off and eats in two bites.

It’s not until he gets to the back of the store that Mickey hits the jackpot: a lone can of beans, the metal battered and bent, at the back of a shelf. With a hasty curse he drags it out, takes out his butterfly knife and uses it to carve a hole in the top. Mickey doesn’t hesitate, just tilts his head back and begins pouring the beans in, juice running down his chin and into the palm he’s cupped underneath it. He pauses, brings the handful of juice to his mouth and slurps it down, then resumes pouring the beans into his mouth, his palm cupped to catch the drips.

It goes on like this until there are no beans left. Then Mickey uses his knife to open up the can some more. He runs his fingers around the inside to wipe up more of the dregs, cutting his thumb on the ragged metal. He tilts his head back, tongue sticking out, and shakes the can over it to catch the last few drops. Finally, he has to accept that he’s drained the can dry, and he reluctantly tosses it aside.

It’s a square meal at least - more than he’s had in days. It will get him to Chicago, and once he gets there he’s sure to find a bounty of food. Perhaps not food that other people would eat - neat little rations in carefully preserved packets - but stuff that Mickey Milkovich is willing to eat to stay alive. Moldy food, scraps, crumbs. Rats, if he can catch them. Lost family pets that are still too trusting of humans.

Mickey hears a car engine approaching in the distance. He freezes, listening carefully. Yep, definitely getting closer. Keeping his head low, he hurries out of the gas station, runs around the side, jumps on a dumpster and scrambles up an air conditioning unit and drags himself onto the roof. He sprints over the bit of roof that covers the pumps, throws himself onto his belly, and lines up the sights of his crossbow, watching the road.

A few seconds pass. Then a station wagon comes around the corner, pulls into the gas station lot. Mickey peers at the driver through his sights. It’s a man, middle-aged. A woman next to him. And…

Three kids pile out of the back. Mickey pulls his lips back over his teeth. The parents are idiots, letting their kids get out without checking the place first. He could shoot one of the little bastards between the eyes in a heartbeat. But these morons are oblivious, climbing out of the car, talking to their kids in loud voices. They’re dressed kind of fancy, even if the clothes are wrinkled and dirty. Mickey is amazed that they’ve lasted this long.

‘I want candy,’ one of the little brats whines.

‘Maybe we’ll find some today, honey,’ the mother says soothingly. She spots the zombie the Mickey killed earlier, pauses for a moment, uncertain.

‘Let’s check inside,’ the dad says. ‘Come on, kids.’

Fucking idiots.

Mickey listens to the crunch of their footsteps on the asphalt, waits until they’re inside. Then he swings his legs down over the side of the roof, lowers himself down until he’s hanging on by just his fingertips, then drops. He hisses at the pain that shoots through the soles of his feet, but quickly makes his way to the car.

The keys aren’t in the ignition - apparently these people aren’t that dumb, but Mickey finds a couple of little saltine packets in the glovebox. Before he can continue searching, however, a piercing voice rings out through the air.

‘Daddy! Daddy!’

Mickey whips the crossbow up, takes aim, glares down it at the little girl staring at him from several feet away. She’s wearing blue jeans and a pink sweater with some cartoon character on it, and she’s looking at Mickey like he’s a monster that just crawled out of a swamp.

The dad comes sprinting out of the gas station towards the little girl, but scrapes to a halt when Mickey lifts the crossbow and growls, ‘Stop right fucking there!’

The poor schmuck wavers on the spot, looking from Mickey to his daughter. The mom is standing some way behind him, the other two kids gathered to her side, staring at Mickey in horror.

‘Please,’ the dad says, his voice shaky. ‘Please, we don’t want any trouble.’

Mickey laughs, and realizes as he’s doing so that he sounds kind of crazy. ‘Don’t know if you noticed, but trouble ain’t waiting around for an invite these days.’

‘Daddy,’ the little girl whispers, her eyes filling with tears.

Mickey opens his mouth to tell the guy to toss the keys, so that he can take the car and leave these morons in the dust. But something holds him back. A kind of warmth, at the back of his mind. A powerful memory of an admonishing, irritatingly self-righteous tone.

_You can’t take their car, Mickey. The kids will die on the road._

‘The kids are gonna die, anyway,’ he growls, only realizing when the girl lets out an anguished wail that he’s spoken aloud.

_You gotta give them a chance. Let them go, Mick._

While Mickey is wavering, hesitating, a gunshot suddenly rings out and the wing mirror on the car shatters. He swears, ducks down behind the open door. The mother - the fucking _mother_ \- is holding a gun and she just shot at him.

The little girl runs back to her father as Mickey scrambles around the back of the car. He needs to get the hell out of here. Not only is his crossbow no match for a gun, that dumb bitch just made so much noise that it’s sure to attract every zombie for miles around. Sure enough, he can already see one of them staggering stupidly up the road.

‘Get away from the car!’ the dad yells.

‘Fuck you, Brady Bunch!’ Mickey fires back. Fuck it, though. He needs to get out of here.

Taking a deep breath and hugging the crossbow tight to his chest, Mickey launches himself out from behind the car and starts sprinting. Almost immediately he hears another gunshot and, seemingly at the same time, feels a white hot line carve itself across the outside of his left bicep. He shouts with pain, staggers, but keeps running.

The zombies are converging now. Mickey veers away from one of them, resists the temptation to shoot at it. As he runs down the road, he hears the car peel out behind him and drive off in the opposite direction, no doubt taking with it supplies that could have lasted Mickey for weeks.

After about half a mile Mickey slows to a walk, his breath harsh and thin in his chest. Years of heavy smoking and drinking haven’t exactly left him in the best shape, and despite his recent meal he’s dizzy from malnourishment and dehydration.

In the distance, he sees a sign telling him that Chicago is now just 15 miles away. With his feet aching and his arm stinging, Mickey thinks of pale skin and red hair and a deep, teasing voice. He grits his teeth, pulls his new jacket around him, and continues onwards.


	7. Day Sixty-Eight, Part Two

Yevgeny is crying. He’s been crying for a while now. Ian doesn’t know how long.

Ian needs to get up. He needs to comfort Yevgeny. He needs to check their supplies, check the traps. There are a million and one things that need to be done, and the thought of them weighs Ian down like he’s wearing a lead blanket, makes it impossible to do anything but lie here.

Yevgeny toddles over to Ian, leans over and prods at Ian’s face with his little fingers, his face red and wet with tears. ‘Dah-deee,’ he whines, his voice piercing Ian’s ears like a drill. ‘Dah-dee hun-gree.’

Ian closes his eyes wearily. He’s been here before. This is the lowest of the low days, when doing anything other than lying in bed feels like a Herculean task, and he just wants to shut the whole world out. Ian knows that Yev is suffering because of this, but the knowledge isn’t the motivating spark it should be. The thought of Yev’s dependence just weighs him down even more, makes it hard to breathe and eat, drains the energy out of him.

His eyes still closed, Ian feels Yev’s hot cheeks pressed against his forehead, hears the thump of Yev’s bottom hitting the floor as he sits down clumsily. Then Yev is pulling his hair, rocking Ian’s head back and forth. ‘Dah- _dee_ , hun- _gree_ ,’ he complains in sing-song, each syllable timed with a push or a pull of Ian’s head. ‘Dah- _dee_ , hun- _gree_ , Dah- _dee_ , hun- _gree_ , Dah-’

‘Fuck _off_ , Yev!’ Ian explodes, his voice rough and grating. Yev’s fingers leave his hair immediately, but Yev doesn’t start crying again like Ian expects him to. Instead he just sits there. Ian can hear his small breaths, snuffly and distressed and… scared. Fucking scared. Scared of Ian.

It’s the urgent guilt that finally gets Ian moving, sitting up, gathering Yev up into his arms, hugging his stiff little body.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispers, his fingers clenched tight in Yev’s too-big clothes. ‘I’m so sorry, Yev. I shouldn’t have yelled.’

Yev stays rigid, but it seems more out of stubbornness than fear now. Slowly, Ian pulls out of the hug, pushes the toddler back so that he can look him in the eye, and draws up a few sluggish drops of effort to force a smile onto his face. ‘Let’s get you some food, huh?’

He’s relieved to see Yev pout sulkily in response. Pouting means attitude. Pouting means Yev isn’t afraid.

Ian sets Yev down on the mattress on the floor that is their bed and heads over to the corner of the room to check their supplies. He found a house with a basement that has two entrances: a trapdoor inside the house, and a set of doors outside. He covered the trapdoor with a rug, parked a car in front of the exterior doors to conceal them from easy view, and then trashed the car’s windows, removed the tires, so that no one would bother trying to steal it.

They’ve been down here for weeks now. Ian isn’t sure how many. It’s less than ideal - the damp of the basement makes Yev cough, and it’s starting to get very cold down here. But being underground muffles the sound of Yev’s crying fits, and Ian doesn’t have to worry about barricading windows. When a horde of zombies passes through the town, Ian quietly padlocks both doors from the inside, builds a blanket fort to further conceal the sound of them, and hunkers down with Yev until the horde has passed. Sometimes it can take days.

They were fortunate, in the beginning, that when Ian ran out of his meds and started getting sick again he was hit with a manic phase, not a depressive one. The manic phase was dangerous, but depression would have been deadly. Manic Ian treated the new reality like a game, ran around taking absurd risks to scavenge food and supplies, kept Yev happy by singing to him and playing with him. Manic Ian set up a makeshift rainwater tank on the roof of the building, meticulously organized the food he found into carefully stacked rations. Manic Ian killed dozens and dozens and dozens of zombies, whistling cheerfully as he smashed their rotting heads with the bat. Manic Ian had a clear plan, knew for sure how he was going to survive this.

It’s always the same. Manic Ian writes a lot of checks that depressed Ian can’t cash.

Ian finds a tin of spaghetti in sauce on top of the now small and messy pile of food that they have left. He opens it up, sets it on top of the little camping stove that he found to warm it up. Yev toddles over from the bed, sits down next to Ian, watches the spaghetti slowly cook. He reaches out his little fingers towards the flame curiously, and Ian catches them before they get too close.

‘You cold, buddy?’ he asks. He cups Yev’s small hands in his big ones, brings them up to his mouth and huffs out a few hot breaths onto them. Yev wriggles and grins. He rocks forward and starts trying to mimic Ian, puffing out his cheeks and blowing on Ian’s hands.

The spaghetti is starting to bubble in the tin.

A couple of weeks into their stay here, Ian had cooked spaghetti on a day when Yev was being, to put it indelicately, a real little shit. Tantrums and sulking all day. “No!” seemingly the only word in his vocabulary. Kicking Ian viciously in the stomach when Ian tried to hug him. Finally, his temper rising, Ian had settled in for the night and made Yev a little bowl of spaghetti. The demon child had taken one look at it, let out a high-pitched screech of defiance, and then struck the bowl so hard that it flew across the room.

Ian had killed four zombies to get that spaghetti. He’d nearly been bitten. He had looked at the spaghetti scattered across the floor, looked at Yev’s smug expression, and had nearly gone blind with rage. He’d grabbed Yev by the shoulders, shook him, screamed right in his face - the most awful things. He wasn’t sure how much of it Yev had understood, but Ian would never be able to forget the way the little boy had looked up at him then, the way he’d cowered.

It scares Ian so much. More than the zombies. More than the gangs wandering the Chicago area. More than hunger and cold and sickness. He’s scared that he’s going to fuck this up, that he’s going to destroy this kid’s life because he’s not a good enough person.

The spaghetti is spitting now. Ian hurriedly shakes himself out of his daze, turns the stove off, leaving behind just the dim light of the fluorescent wind-up flashlight in the corner of the room, which Ian needs to wind up again. He pours the food into Yev’s bowl oh-so-carefully, scrapes the inside of the tin to make sure he gets everything out. Normally the smell would make him hungry, but the depression dampens Ian’s enthusiasm for food. He can hear his stomach growling, knows that it’s empty, but has no desire to eat. It’s one of the very few perks of the low times.

Yev waves his hands, tries to grab at the bowl, but Ian holds it out of reach. ‘Got to let it cool, little man,’ he explains. He blows on it gently, the steam ducking and bobbing under his breath. After a couple of minutes Ian tests it with his pinky finger, decides the temperature is OK, and starts to feed Yev.

Here’s the thing about the way they live now: they need every scrap of food they can get, which means that survival depends on Ian being able to feed a toddler and make sure that as much food as possible goes _inside_ his mouth.

They could make a game show out of this challenge.

Yev blows a raspberry with a mouthful of spaghetti and the sauce drips down his chin. Ian hurriedly cups his hand underneath to catch it before it falls, sighs. Once Yev has swallowed the spaghetti, Ian carefully wipes the sauce up into his mouth, scooping it in with his fingers, makes sure Yev swallows it. The kid smacks his orange-stained lips together, then opens his mouth wide for more spaghetti, showing off his baby teeth.

There are more of them now. Ian knows he should probably brush them or something, but they’re going to fall out eventually, right? The bigger priority had been trying to keep Yev quiet through the teething pains. Ian had found a bottle of whiskey stashed in a desk drawer upstairs in the house, and had been rubbing it on Yev’s gums to soothe the pain. Monica had told him that Frank did the same for him and Fiona and Lip when they were babies, and while taking parenting tips from Frank Gallagher definitely wasn’t a road that Ian should go down, the trick had certainly helped keep Yev quiet. Hell, he wouldn’t be a Milkovich if he couldn’t handle his booze.

Yev finishes the spaghetti and Ian begins laboriously scraping up the remaining sauce with the spoon, encouraging Yev to finish it off - even though the kid’s pretty full and sleepy. Afterwards, Ian licks the bowl clean. He tried to get Yev to do this as well, but most of it just ended up on various bits of his face.

Ian sets about cleaning Yev up, hands him a cup of sterilized rainwater and watches him to make sure he drinks it. Some of the fog of the depression has lifted. It helps, taking care of Yev. Gives Ian something external to focus on, makes him feel like maybe he’s not completely fucking everything up.

Yev slurps down the last of the water, belches loudly. He’s swaying a little now, looking sleepy.

‘Ready for a nap, bud?’ Ian asks.

Jerked out of his doze, Yev widens his eyes, raises his eyebrows. For a moment he looks so much like Mickey that it takes Ian’s breath away.

A gunshot rings out in the distance.

Yev doesn’t seem to notice, doesn’t know what the sound is, but Ian freezes. Listens.

Seconds pass. Then, another gunshot.

Ian moves, the weight of his depression still hanging around his neck like a millstone, but urgency giving him the energy to act. He grabs the flashlight, double checks the padlocks, then hastily begins setting up the blanket fort around the mattress. He can hear shuffling footsteps approaching overhead. The gunshots are attracting the zombies, and they’re drawing together into a group as they pass through the town.

Making a deliberate effort not to let Yev notice his panic, Ian picks the toddler up and carries him over to the blanket fort. Yev feels so much heavier now, or maybe Ian is getting weaker. Probably both. Ducking between the sheets, Ian lays Yev down on the mattress and covers him up with a thin quilt, folding it over to make it thicker.

The snarls and groans and footsteps overhead grow louder. Yev grizzles a little, and Ian shushes him. Rests a hand on top of the toddler’s head comfortingly, watches in relief as Yev’s eyelids start to droop.

Ian knows he should stay vigilant, with the zombies so close, but even the simple act of feeding Yev has exhausted him. He lets his head rest on the mattress, closes his eyes, and lets the sound of the undead lull him back to sleep.


	8. Day Ninety-Two

It’s snowing in Chicago. Not much, but Mickey still gets a surprise when he steps outside and sees the dusting of white over everything. It covers up the mess, the shit in the the streets, the ugliness and decay. Mickey can’t take the time to admire how pretty everything is, though - all he can think about is how much of a pain in the ass this snow is going to be once it really sets in.

Fuck it. They can melt it down for water, at least.

‘More fires uptown.’

Mickey is startled out of his thoughts by the unannounced arrival of Iggy, who leans in the doorway of the Milkovich house, digging a finger into his ear.

‘Yeah? Probably some idiots trying to warm up, didn’t know what the fuck they were doing.’ Mickey eyes Iggy critically. He thought his current look was pretty feral, but he has nothing on Iggy. He’d found his brother holed up in the house with a pile of guns and a respectable collection of booze and drugs, having spent most of the first few post-zombie weeks getting high and drunk - often at the same time. Now, Mickey was pretty sure Iggy hadn’t bathed once since this had all begun. His teeth were yellower than ever, and he was probably digging some kind of fungus out of his ear.

A bundled-up thug, shotgun in hand, walks past the house, offering them a curt nod as he passes. There are a couple dozen of them now, occupying three houses in the South Side: the Milkovich house, and two others down the street from them. Mickey is in charge. He’d been ambushed by these guys while out scavenging, and had corrected their mistake by stabbing their leader eight times in the face and neck. After that they’d started following Mickey around, and he’d done an OK job. They were all still alive, at least.

A shrill whistle pierces the chill air, and Mickey looks up sharply. He knows that signal. It means that one of the guys has come to fill the bounty.

Grabbing his rifle, Mickey slings a backpack over his shoulder and hurries down the steps. There’s the rumble of an engine as the Abramovich brothers’ truck rolls down the street, slowing to a stop in front of those house.

‘What you got?’ Mickey demands as Lukas Abramovich climbs out of the truck.

‘Two dead ones and a live one,’ Lukas says coolly.

‘Let’s take a look.’

The dead ones are shoved into the back, and Mickey steels himself as he looks down at them. They both have fresh stab wounds in their skulls, the black blood spilling over into shocks of tangled red hair, but neither of them look familiar. Mickey frowns, peers closer at the one on the left.

‘I ain’t paying you for this one,’ he says, tugs at its hair. ‘Dye job. There’s gotta be like, two inches of roots on it. I told you, natural redheads only.’

‘I wasn’t looking at its roots,’ Lukas shoots back defensively.

‘Well next time you’ll know to check. Let’s take a look at the live one.’

Mickey makes a concerted effort to stamp down on the hope rising inside him as he walks around to the side of the truck. He can see the person inside, their head covered with a black hood to prevent them from seeing where they’ve been taken. Lukas opens the truck door and Mickey’s heart begins to race as he takes in the pale skin, curls of ginger hairs on the back of the guy’s hands, which are duct-taped together. They’re smooth, unwrinkled, young. It could be… it _could_ be…

Mickey reaches up, grips the material of the black hood covering the guy’s head, takes a deep, quiet breath through his nose. Then he pulls the hood off.

It’s a kid. Just some kid. Late teens, probably. Firetruck red hair. Freckles so thickly crowded that a lot of them joined up. Looking at Mickey with a mix of confusion and terror. Clamping down on the heavy weight of disappointment in his chest, Mickey checks the kid's roots. Yep, natural redhead. He’ll have to pay up.

‘OK,’ Mickey says, stepping back from the truck. ‘Dimebag of meth for the dead one. I’ll let you take your pick for the breather. Two packs of smokes or a bottle of whiskey?’

‘Which brands?’

‘Camels and Jack Daniels.’

Lukas ponders it for a moment, then says, ‘Camels.’ Mickey nods. Lukas is smarter than most, knows he can turn a profit by bartering the cigarettes in smaller amounts. Mickey pulls them out of his backpack, along with the dimebag, and hands them over.

As Lukas is inspecting them he asks casually, ‘So, any of the other guys know the real reason we’re rounding up redheads?’

Mickey looks up sharply. After a pause he said, ‘I s’pose you’re gonna tell me what you think you know.’

Lukas chuckles evenly. ‘C’mon, man. I lived across the road from the Gallaghers. And you weren’t too quiet about coming out.’ He meets Mickey’s gaze, smirking a little. Smart fucker.

‘No,’ Mickey says. ‘They don’t know.’

‘Huh.’ Lukas carefully draws a cigarette out of the pack, lights it with a battered old lighter. ‘I see why you wouldn’t tell them. Could be more specific, though. You’re paying out for chicks, for old people. Why not say you’re looking for a dude?’

Mickey scratches his eyebrow with his thumb. He’d considered it. But…

‘Once they’ve been dead a couple weeks, they all start to look the same,’ he explains. ‘And most of these fuckers are dumb as shit. They can’t follow detailed instructions. So I just put the bounty on all redheads. There ain’t that many.’

‘You want him even if he’s dead?’

‘If he’s dead,’ Mickey says heavily. ‘I wanna know.’

The eldest Abramovich brother nods thoughtfully, takes a drag of his cigarette.

‘Hey, Lukas?’ Mickey says.

‘Yeah, Mickey?’

‘I don’t need to tell you that if you find Ian and you try to pull any bullshit, I’ll skin you while you’re still breathing. I don’t need to tell you that, right?’

He can see Lukas trying to pretend that he isn’t intimidated. The guy is half a foot taller and about a hundred pounds heavier than Mickey, but once people have seen Mickey in action they don’t underestimate him again.

‘Nah, man. I wouldn’t play you like that.’

‘See, what I would do is I’d cut you, all around there…’ Mickey gestures at Lukas’ lower stomach. ‘And then I’d just start ripping up. Until your skin’s stuck over your head like a sweater. You might pass out, but I can’t guarantee it.’

‘Mickey, chill the fuck out,’ Lukas snaps, definitely looking nervous now.

‘Same goes for if you run around blabbing what you know,’ Mickey ploughs on, rounding on the other man, eyeballing him coolly. ‘You got a good deal here, Lukas. You got a leg up on the competition. Don’t fuck it up by getting greedy.'

Lukas raises his hands in mock-surrender. ‘OK, relax. I won’t tell anyone.’

‘Better not.’

Turning away, Mickey grabs the red-haired kid by the back of his collar, drags him out of the truck, pulls him aside as Lukas climbs back behind the wheel.

‘P-please,’ the kid says. He overheard Mickey’s speech about skinning Lukas, and Mickey is surprised he hasn’t pissed himself yet. ‘Just let me go.’

‘Oh fucking relax, Carrot-Top, you’re free to go.’ Mickey pulls his knife out of his pocket, slices through the duct tape around the guy’s wrists. ‘You ain’t who I’m looking for anyway.’

The kid rubs the red marks where the tape was. Mickey watches the motion. Drags his gaze up and down the redhead’s body. Takes in his pale skin, his green eyes, the vibrancy of his hair. Sucks in a breath.

‘Hey,’ he says, as the kid starts to walk away. He turns back around nervously. Mickey scratches his chin. ‘Uh, if you don’t wanna go back empty-handed, we can cut a deal.’

The kid hesitates, looks like he wants to run away, but hangs back. ‘What kind of deal?’ he asks nervously.

 _Jesus,_ Mickey thinks. ‘Goods for services,’ he says slowly, pointedly, hooking a thumb into the pocket of his jeans.

The redhead recoils a little, but doesn’t shoot Mickey down. ‘You got any antibiotics?’ he asks. ‘My sister is sick.’

Mickey nods. ‘Got a whole bunch of meds.’ It’s amazing how much shit you can find when there’s a whole gang working for you.

For a moment the kid looks like he’s debating just running away, but then he nods. ‘Alright.’

Mickey leads him back to the Milkovich house, where Iggy is still sitting on the porch. His brother looks from Mickey to the redhead, a dumb grin spreading across his face.

‘You say a fucking word, I’ll throw you to the zombies. Swear to fucking god.’ Mickey bites out harshly.

‘Ain’t saying nothing.’ Iggy stands up slowly, saunters down the steps, passing the redhead on the way, turning his head to leer at him. The kid cringes away. Mickey doesn’t blame him.

He pulls open the front door, steps over the threshold, holds the door open expectantly. The kid peers into the gloom and decay of the Milkovich household, hesitates, looks at Mickey. Mickey says nothing, just raises his eyebrows in a question. The bare skin of the kid’s throat looks so pale as he cranes his neck. Mickey feels that familiar, delicious thrill of anticipation curling in his stomach, chasing away the cold.

The kid makes up his mind, heads into the house. Mickey takes one last look out at the snow-dusted South Side streets, then slams the door shut behind him.


	9. Day One Hundred and Twelve

Ian is starving. 

He’s been hungry plenty of times before, having spent his childhood living well below the poverty line, but he’s never known what starvation felt like until now. There’s this deep, deep ache in the pit of his empty stomach that’s been there for days now, and Yev is an impossible weight on his back. If Ian wasn’t manic, he would have stopped moving long ago. Instead, the hunger makes his mania burn with a feverish brightness.

He crouches down on the edge of the rooftop, eyeing the huge department store down across the street. It will have been raided over and over again, obviously, but there might still be some food in there. New shoes for Ian. Warmer clothes for Yevgeny. Maybe even a proper baby carrier. Ian has Yevgeny strapped into one that he made himself out of spare parts and it digs into his back, has left a painful red welt right across his spine.

Yev grizzles a little around the stale cookie that he’s sucking on, spilling crumbs down the back of Ian’s shirt. They stayed in the basement of that house until Ian had picked clean every building for two miles around, but eventually he’d had to accept that they needed to make a move for Chicago. Yev is doing OK, thanks to Ian giving him every scrap of food he finds, but that cookie is the last of their rations. He needs to make a move on the department store.

Which is surrounded by zombies.

Ian has a gun, but there’s only one round left and he’s saving it for Yev as a last resort. If they get mobbed by the undead, he’s not going to let Yev get torn apart while he’s still alive to feel it. Ian’s not going to let Yev turn into one of those things. He has a knife too, and the old Gallagher family baseball bat - now battered and dented and bloodstained. Nowhere near the arsenal he needs to fight off all the zombies down there.

Just when Ian is considering rigging up some kind of zipline to take him to the roof of the department store (in his current mental state, he’d really be stupid enough to try it), a battered van comes screeching around the corner, ploughing into a clump of zombies and knocking them down like bowling pins. Ian swears, ducks down lower, wincing as the position presses the rough edge of Yev’s carrier even harder against the raw spot on his back. As he watches, two guys get out of the front of the van and another jumps out the back. They’re all carrying rifles, and as they begin methodically shooting zombies in the head Ian hears the  _ cough-cough-cough _ of suppressed gunfire. These guys are strong, organized, prepared. They know what they’re doing.

Ian’s mind races as he watches them clear out the zombies in front of the department store. He can’t let himself get caught by these guys but… they may have just opened up an important opportunity for him. The store is a big place. If Ian sneaks in behind them, searches different areas… he can grab some stuff while the coast is clear. The heavy zombie presence could mean that there’s a lot of good stuff left behind and  _ god, _ Ian is so hungry. If he doesn’t get something to eat soon, he and Yev will both die anyway.

Yev has finished his cookie now, is getting bored. He kicks his legs, catching Ian in the ribs. ‘Daddy down,’ he says, bouncing in his seat. ‘Daddy wanna get down.’

‘Shhh, Yev,’ Ian hisses urgently, creeping away from the edge of the roof. ‘Not right now, OK?’

‘Dah-deee…’ Yev whines.

‘Yev,  _ no _ .’

Yev falls silent. He knows that tone of voice means that Ian’s serious. Ian’s used it many times over the past few weeks… months… however long it’s been, and Yev finally seems to be gaining awareness of what a dangerous world it is they live in. On the one hand, it’s good for their survival. On the other hand, it kills Ian to know that Yev is growing up in a world where he isn’t safe, and he knows it.

Treading carefully, so as not to make too much noise, Ian descends the fire escape on the side of the building. When he gets to the last level he has to drop down, holding onto the metal by his fingertips, and it’s only when he’s trying to lower himself slowly that he realizes he doesn’t have the energy to hold himself up by his arms any more. He lands roughly, stumbles, feels Yev grip the back of his EMT jacket. 

The snow, which would have been turned to slush by thousands of passing footsteps and cars in a normal Chicago, is largely undisturbed save for the dragging footsteps of the now-incapacitated zombies. It crunches under Ian’s boots, clings to them, the cold seeping through the worn-down soles to bite at his feet. He approaches the department store slowly, hunched down. There’s a  _ cough-cough-cough _ of gunfire inside, on the East side of the store. So, Ian needs to stick to the West side.

They’ve been back in Chicago for a few days now. The city is still very bad - zombies everywhere, and where there aren’t zombies it’s only because gangs have cleared them out. The gangs are worse. The first place Ian went was back home, but the Gallagher house was empty and cold and completely trashed, with no sign that his family had been back there. While Ian was looking around, he saw a group of nasty-looking guys with guns in the street outside and had made a hasty exit.

He can hear  _ these  _ nasty-looking guys talking among themselves, their voices echoing off the walls of the department store. The shelves are mostly empty. Ian finds himself in the clothing section, searches for a pair of boots in his size. There aren’t any, but he finds a pair that are two sizes too big, figures he can stuff the toes with old newspaper. He ties the laces together, slings them around his neck. Yev plays with the knot. In the kids’ section Ian finds a hat with a bobble on top and ear flaps. He hands it back over his shoulder and, with a little guidance, Yev pulls it over his head. It’s too big, and comes down past his eyes. Yev giggles, and Ian quickly throws a finger up to his lips -  _ quiet _ .

Too late. The noise has attracted the attention of a zombie, which lurches around the corner of the aisle, snarling. Ian steels himself for a fight, but notices that the zombie’s eyes are bloody and torn out, with scratches all around the sockets. Probably the work of birds. Slowly, treading as silently as he can, Ian backs away from the zombie down the aisle. He’s so focused on it that he doesn’t notice the zombie at the other end until it’s too late - until it’s snarling and grabbing at Yev.

‘ _ Fuck!’  _ Ian hisses, whirling around and stabbing the attacker in the softer bit of skull at its temple. As he yanks the knife out it falls backwards, crashes into a shelf, creates a cacophany of noise. Suddenly there are snarls all around, zombies emerging from dark corners, levering themselves up from the floor. Ian swears again, takes off, makes a run for the exit, glancing back over his shoulder to try and see how many are following him…

_ Cough-cough-cough. _

Ian ducks instinctively. Behind him, zombies topple limply to the floor. Yev is crying, long wails of unhappiness ringing in Ian’s ears. He looks up with dread, sees two of the guys with guns standing ahead of him. Ian is trapped - the living ahead of him, the dead behind - shelves to his left and right. He stays low, trying to come up with a plan as the gang members take down the zombies.

Finally the pop of gunfire slows, then stops. Ian checks behind him to make sure Yev is OK, then straightens up, squares off against the other guys warily.

The guy in front - thirties, greying hair, a long scar over his eye - looks Ian up and down. ‘Look what we got here,’ he says slowly. ‘A  _ thief.’ _

‘I’m just scavenging, same as you,’ Ian says, in as calm a voice as he can muster. He tries for the sympathy angle. ‘My kid needs food.’

‘This is  _ our _ turf,’ the guy says dispassionately. ‘Any food in here is  _ our _ food. So you’re a thief.’ He takes a menacing step forward.

‘Wait, man.’ The other gang member has joined them, moves ahead, peers at Ian. ‘That’s a redhead. There’s a boss in South Side got a bounty on redheads. Big rewards, dead or alive.’

‘What’s he want with redheads?’ the first guy says, frowning.

‘I heard he fucks ‘em.’

‘Even the guys?’ the third guy, a scrawny blond who looks barely out of his teens, pipes up.

‘ _ Especially _ the guys.’

‘Even the dead ones?’

‘Probably.’

‘What’s worth more?’ the greying leader asks, looking Ian up and down. ‘Dead or alive?’

‘Can’t remember. Alive, I guess. If he’s alive they have the option of killing him, right?’

As he listens to the gang members casually discuss whether or not to kill him, Ian’s mind is racing. A gang leader in the South Side who has a thing for redheads. There’s no way, right? No way…

Suddenly, a zombie lurches into view behind the gang members, snarling loudly. As they turn around, momentarily distracted, Ian doesn’t waste the opportunity. He sprints away as fast as he can, leaping over fallen zombies, his back screaming in pain at the scrape of Yev’s carrier. The welt is bleeding openly now, but it’s the least of Ian’s worries. 

A bullet thwacks into the shelf in front of him and Ian veers wildly, but behind him he hears the leader yell, ‘Don’t fucking shoot, we want him alive! He can’t run for long with the kid.’

The guy is right, of course, but Ian doesn’t need to keep running for long. He just needs to get outside, find somewhere to hide. Ian’s good at hiding. 

He rounds another corner, now in the home stretch, the exit right ahead of him and it’s… it’s…

It’s blocked.

Half a dozen guys. Heavily armed. Spread out in such a way that there’s no way Ian’s getting past them. He staggers to a halt, trapped, hopeless. The other guys closing in fast on his heels, Yevgeny whining and tugging on his jacket.

Suddenly, a wave of exhaustion and defeat crashes over Ian. It’s over. He feels like crying. He reaches into his jacket pocket, grips the pistol hidden there, thinking about the one bullet he has left.

‘Ian?’

That voice.

He must be hallucinating. From the hunger. From being off his meds. There’s no way.

But one of the guys at the door is stepping forward, moving like he doesn’t realize he’s doing it. Fifteen feet away, then just ten feet, then five. Staring at Ian, an utterly devastated expression on his face. 

Mickey. Fucking. Milkovich.


	10. Day One Hundred and Twelve, Part Two

Ian is standing in the Milkovich living room, looking around at the boarded up windows and piles of weapons and loot, having carefully deposited the kid on the sagging couch. Mickey finally, _finally_ , closes the front door, leaving the two of them alone. He can’t stop staring. Ian Gallagher is in his house again. Ian is alive, he’s fucking _alive…_

‘Fuck,’ Mickey breathes, his voice cracking. He crossed the room in a heartbeat, pulls Ian into a fierce hug, grips the back of his jacket, palms the back of his head, buries his head in Ian’s shoulder and just breathes him in. He feels Ian’s arms came up, one gripping Mickey’s shoulder, the other tight around his back, his head lolling wearily against Mickey’s.

‘I can’t fucking believe I found you,’ Mickey confesses brokenly. ‘ _Fuck,_ Ian...’

‘It’s OK,’ Ian whispers, pulling back, lifting one hand to cup Mickey’s jaw, then pressing in to kiss Mickey with cold, chapped lips. Mickey takes it hungrily, kisses back, opening his mouth to slide his tongue against Ian’s. He grips the material of Ian’s worn, dirty uniform, pulls Ian’s body hard against him. Ever since that first time, kissing Ian feels as natural and as necessary as breathing. Every time they start, Mickey can’t seem to stop.

It’s only when Mickey starts tugging urgently at the zipper of Ian’s jacket that the redhead pulls back, covering Mickey’s hands with his own, saying, ‘Wait, wait…’ Mickey’s confused for a moment, but then he remembers the kid when Ian crouches down to check on him, brush the backs of his fingers over the kid’s cheek, mutter soothing reassurances to him. In turn, the kid reaches out with his stubby fingers, says, ‘Dah-deee…’

‘Daddy?’ Mickey echoes, raising his eyebrows, glad that his voice is a little steadier now. ‘You got something to tell me?’

Ian glances up at him, smiles ruefully. ‘It’s just what he calls me. I figured it was easiest.’

Mickey nods. ‘So who is he, anyway? Another Gallagher? There’s so fucking many of you people, I lose track.’

Ian looks up again, this time with an expression of disbelief. ‘Are you serious?’ he asks.

‘What?’

Ian picks the kid up from the couch, balances him on his hip, angles him so that Mickey can get a better look. ‘Mick, it’s Yevgeny.’

Mickey looks from Ian to the kid, then back at Ian, then back at the kid again. ‘No fucking way!’ he exclaims. He peers closer at the toddler’s face. Kids this young, their faces all look the same to Mickey - kind of round and squishy. But looking closer, yeah, that’s Mickey’s kid alright. ‘Well, shit. Hey, little man.’

Ian gives him a look that’s… complicated. Frustrated. Disappointed. But there’s a tenderness to it as well. ‘You wanna hold him?’ he asks.

‘Sure.’ Mickey takes him from Ian’s arms, holds the kid under his armpits, peers at him and bounces him a couple of times. ‘Wow, you got heavy.’ To Ian he says, ‘What is he now, two? He was born in the winter, right?’

Ian nods. ‘November 23rd,’ he says quietly.

Mickey brings the kid to his chest. ‘Svetlana?’ he asks. Ian just shrugs. OK, bitch ain’t dead. Just missing in action.

The kid nestles his head against Mickey’s shoulder, yawns widely.

‘Uh-oh, looks like someone needs a nap,’ Mickey says, trying and probably failing to hide his eagerness to get Ian alone. ‘Come on, little guy, I’ll make up a bed for you in Mandy’s old room.’

He heads into said room, and Ian follows him in. ‘I can handle this, man,’ Mickey says. ‘Just make yourself at home.’

Ian doesn’t leave, though. While Mickey is grabbing some blankets from a pile in the corner of the room, Ian rests a hand on top of Yevgeny’s head, hesitates. ‘Shit,’ he says. ‘I haven’t let him out of my sight for… months.’

Mickey takes a moment to process that. Fuck, Ian looks exhausted. He actually has a small reddish beard growing in on his jaw, his chin, his upper lip, and Mickey’s never seen him with more than light morning stubble before. The skin under Ian’s eyes looks purple, bruised, like he hasn’t slept properly in weeks. And he’s lost weight. Mickey felt it when they hugged, when they kissed. Yet Yevgeny is fat and healthy. Fucking Ian Gallagher. Fucking martyr complex.

Once the bed’s made up, Yevgeny curls up under his blanket and falls asleep almost immediately, sucking his thumb. Mickey persuades Ian to leave him, then drags his long-missing partner into the bedroom next door.

‘Fuck,’ Mickey mutters, pressing Ian up against the door roughly, latching onto his mouth, grabbing Ian’s hair with one hand, his hip with the other, pushes forward to let Ian feel how hard he is. Ian pants thinly into Mickey’s mouth. It makes Mickey fucking wild. He tugs at Ian’s jacket. ‘Take this off,’ he grates out, yanking the zipper down, pushing it off Ian’s shoulders, exposing the thin, holey sweater underneath it. ‘Fuck, get it all off.’

Ian detaches himself from Mickey’s mouth, drops his head forward, and pants in Mickey’s ear. ‘Mickey,’ he moans. ‘Do you have anything to eat?’

Mickey’s so out of his mind with lust that at first the question just registers as dirty talk, thanks to the low, pleading tone in which it’s asked. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he murmurs. ‘Got something for you to eat right here.’

‘No, Mickey, I mean… food. I need food.’

Finally, the query penetrates Mickey’s dumb, frustrated, sex-clouded brain. He runs his hands down Ian’s back, feels the bony protrusion of his shoulder blades, the bumps of his spine. Fuck, he’s skinny. ‘When’s the last time you ate?’ Mickey asks.

Ian gives a loose shrug. ‘Couple days?’

‘Fuck. Hold on.’

Mickey reluctantly lets Ian go, searches under the bed until he retrieves the small metal safe where he hides the shit that he doesn’t want Iggy to steal. As he turns the dial back and forth, Ian sits down heavily on the edge of the bed, his long legs sprawled out, his shoulders hunched over. He pulls the holey sweater over his head, drops it to the floor. There’s a soiled T-shirt underneath that was probably white at some point. The thick smell of stale sweat rolls off him.

‘Here.’ Mickey brings over all the food in the safe: a couple of individually-wrapped Pop Tarts; a chocolate bar; a small bag of shelled almonds; a can of Coke. He watches as Ian tears open one of the Pop Tarts frantically, breaks off big pieces, stuffs them in his mouth, barely chews them before swallowing, breathing hard through his nose. Ian cracks open the Coke, pours some in his mouth while it’s still full of food, gulps it down.

‘Hey, hey, hey, slow down,’ Mickey says, kind of freaked out. ‘Food ain’t going nowhere.’

Ian slows down his chewing, though not by much. After he swallows his current mouthful he looks down, cheeks flushed. ‘I’m so hungry,’ he confesses.

‘Yeah, no shit,’ Mickey chuckles. He reaches up, buries his fingers in Ian’s hair affectionately. _Fuck_ , he missed being able to do that. ‘Eat as much as you want, man.’

But Ian is looking at the food on his lap guiltily. ‘I should save some for Yevgeny,’ he says.

‘It’s _fine,’_ Mickey says, a little exasperated. ‘I got lots of food. Just… fucking eat, Ian. You look like you’re gonna pass out.’

He watches patiently as Ian eats the other Pop Tart, the almonds, washes them down with the Coke. Ian sets the chocolate bar aside, obviously saving it for the kid. Mickey sighs, touches his cheek. Ian looks over at him, his eyes a little brighter now.

‘Thanks,’ he says, quietly.

‘Forget it, man. Hey, I still owe you for all the shit I stole from Towelhead’s place over the years, huh? Call it even.’

Ian laughs. The sound hits Mickey right in the gut, takes his breath away. He never thought he’d get to hear Ian laughing again.

‘Shit,’ Ian is staring at Mickey, eyes scanning his face. ‘You look… _exactly_ the fucking same, Mick.’

Mickey laughs, rubs a hand over his smooth jaw. ‘Hey, I’m the boss round here. Regular shave and haircut are the best way to let people know you’re the boss. Helps me stand out from all the hairy-faced hobos.’

Ian smiles. ‘Is that what I am? A hairy-faced hobo?’

‘You know it.’ Mickey rubs a hand over Ian’s jaw, feeling the scratch of the short, rough hairs. Ian leans into the touch, and then they’re away again. Mickey swings a leg over Ian’s lap, straddles him, holds his head as he plunders Ian’s mouth, tasting the chemical sweetness of the Pop Tarts. Ian grabs his hips, pulls Mickey in close, makes him press his hardening dick against Ian’s stomach. He slides one hand around to the small of Mickey’s back, then pushes it into Mickey’s jeans, sliding a couple of fingers into the humid space between his ass cheeks, making Mickey mutter _fuck_ right into Ian’s mouth.

‘Can I fuck you?’ Ian asks roughly, moving to bite at Mickey’s jaw, his throat. ‘Can I fuck you, Mick?’

A thin, helpless moan escapes Mickey before he can stop it. ‘You want a fucking hand-written invitation?’ he retorts.

Ian fucks him.

He takes it slow, carefully strips Mickey out of every stitch of clothing first - even his socks. He makes Mickey lie on his stomach on the bed, and Mickey closes his eyes as Ian pushes his knees apart, kisses the backs of his legs, rubs his scratchy stubble against the soft, sensitive skin of Mickey’s inner thighs, palms Mickey’s ass, spits messily on his hole a few times. Then he moves up, and Mickey feels Ian’s hot breath on the back of his neck, feels the sticky head of Ian’s dick sliding against his taint. It makes him feel hot all over, makes him ache inside.

‘You good?’ Ian murmurs, biting at the shell of Mickey’s ear.

Mickey doesn’t trust himself to speak, never trusts himself to talk during sex. He just nods messily, his heart racing as Ian braces his forearm across Mickey’s shoulder, clamps a hand down on the back of Mickey’s neck, lines himself up. There’s the usual initial fight as Ian presses his dick forward and Mickey clenches involuntarily, but he focuses on bearing down and then the head of Ian’s dick is easing inside him and _fuck_ , it hurts.

Mickey hisses, his lips pulling back from his teeth as he grimaces. Ian rubs the back of his neck soothingly, keeping up a steady pressure, slowly easing his way inside. Every now and then he gives a little rock of his hips, trying to help Mickey loosen up. It feels like it takes forever for Ian to get all the way in. There’s just so fucking _much_ of him.

‘God,’ Ian rumbles, gripping Mickey’s shoulders. ‘Fuck, you feel so good, Mickey.’

Mickey muffles a whimper as he feels the push and pull of Ian rocking his hips experimentally, rubbing Mickey’s insides. It’s such a vulnerable position; one wrong move and Ian could really hurt him. But it feels good to surrender for just a while, to let someone else take control.

Ian braces himself on the mattress, threads the fingers of his right hand through Mickey’s, then starts to fuck him, gently at first, with shallow little thrusts. Mickey feels the protrusion of Ian’s hip bones as he’s fucked, hears the whistle of breath in Ian’s chest that suggests he’s been sick recently. He closes his eyes and pushes back with his hips, pushes into it.

Ian keeps the pace slow, even. At first Mickey thinks he’s going easy on him, and then he realizes that Ian just might not have the strength for a really hard fuck. It’s good, though. So good. It’s a slow, hot build that steadily drives Mickey wild, has him gasping, rolling his hips to get extra friction, to get Ian deeper.

Mickey comes first. He always comes first. It creeps up on him gradually, until Mickey’s chasing it desperately, and then it’s there. The muscles in his legs cramp as he grinds into it, hand squeezing tight around the head of his cock, and then he’s shaking and coming hard on the sheets, Ian slowing down to massage Mickey through it with these little jerks of his hips.

Then Ian’s mouth is on Mickey’s shoulder, limp hair falling forward to brush Mickey’s over-sensitized skin, and then Ian’s groaning quietly in Mickey’s ear, stilling the motion of his hips, his stomach muscles quivering where they’re pressed against Mickey’s back. Mickey turns his hand over, threads his fingers back through Ian’s, squeezes his hand real tight. Ian gasps, rolling his hips, trying to keep his orgasm going.

Eventually the movement winds down. Ian pants into Mickey’s hair, tilts his hips back, pulls out. Mickey feels some of Ian’s come spilling out, sliding down his taint.

Ian rolls off Mickey’s back, collapses onto the bed. He’s flushed all over, his skin beaded with sweat, and Mickey leans over to drop a hot, wet kiss onto Ian’s slack mouth, feels him feebly trying to respond. With a sigh, Mickey slumps down onto his stomach, ignoring the tacky, cooling come on the sheets. He kisses Ian’s shoulder, strokes Ian’s cheek with the hand that’s flung over his body.

‘Fuck,’ Ian sighs, stroking his thumb over Mickey’s forearm. ‘Fuck, I missed you, Mickey.’

Secretly, Mickey hates the thrill that those words send through him. He’s spent far too long as, basically, Ian’s bitch. Desperate for any kind of validation, any evidence that Ian is as fucking crazy about Mickey as Mickey is about him. All it does is set him up to get hurt, over and over again.

There’s so much shit to deal with. They need to talk about Mexico, probably. Mickey wants to know where Ian’s been these past few months, what’s happened to him, what happened to his family. He needs to get up and go and check in on the patrols, make sure the house is still safe. But just for a while, he lets himself indulge. Rubs his cheek against Ian’s pale skin and breathes in the heady smell of him. Because who knows how long Ian will stay this time.


	11. Day One Hundred and Thirteen

Ian wakes up about an hour before dawn. After Mickey fell asleep, he moved into Mandy’s old room with Yevgeny, let the kid sleep curled up next to him, soaking up the warmth of Ian’s body. Ian is terrified of Yevgeny getting too cold, getting sick. Before he leaves the room, he makes sure Yev is tightly bundled up in the blanket, puts the hat with the ear flaps back on him, kisses the toddler on the forehead as Yev grumbles in his sleep.

Then Ian starts sorting through the stockpile of supplies that Mickey has managed to collect. He lines the food up in order of how perishable it is. He organizes the guns by bullet caliber. He finds a metal pan, fills it with snow from a snow bank outside, melts the snow and then boils it to sterilize it, pours the water into a big two gallon jug he finds lying around. He does this over and over again, until the jug is nearly full.

When he heads out to refill the pan with snow, Ian finds that a small crowd of zombies has gathered outside the house - perhaps attracted by the noise of him digging through the snow. He waves at them cheerily, and they snarl, start dragging themselves towards the house. Ian ducks inside, grabs his bat, then jumps down the steps of the Milkovich porch.

‘Mornin’, fellas,’ he says loudly, then swings his bat and smashes it into the head of the nearest one. It topples to the ground and Ian raises the bat over his head two-handed, slams it down into the fallen zombie’s skull so that bits of bone and brain spatter in a halo on the snow.

Rotting hands snag at Ian’s clothes, and teeth snap closed just inches from his shoulder. Ian ducks away, swings the bat again, takes down another one. He can’t seem to stop smiling. He’s keeping Yevgeny safe. He’s keeping Mickey safe.

_‘Ian!’_

He turns, sees Mickey leaping down the steps in just a tank top and boxers, barefoot, holding a gun with a silencer on it. Ian smiles, waves, shoving back one of the zombies with his bat.

‘Hey, Mick,’ he says, realizing vaguely that he’s talking too loud. ‘Don’t worry, I got this. Go make breakfast…’

There’s a great sucking snarl close to his ear and suddenly Ian finds himself being dragged backwards, stinking cold breath on his throat. He throws an elbow back, twists away, smashes the handle of the bat into the monster’s nose. Behind him he hears the quiet spitting noise of Mickey’s gun, and then a hole opens up in the zombie’s forehead before Ian can finish it off. He frowns, turns on Mickey, who’s taking down the remaining undead.

‘Why’d you do that?’ he asks. ‘I had it.’

Mickey shoots the last zombie in the head and rounds on Ian, wide-eyed and furious, teeth bared and clenched. ‘Get in the fucking house,’ he hisses, grabbing Ian by the back of his T-shirt like a disobedient puppy and all but dragging him back through the gate.

Iggy Milkovich is standing on the porch, watching him. Ian grins broadly, tells Iggy how glad he is to see him. Iggy just stares, and then spits into the snow, and says to Mickey, ‘So your psycho boyfriend came back.’

‘What did you say?’ Ian demands, turning to confront Iggy, but before he can get a response Mickey has him by both elbows and is pulling him inside, slamming the door behind him.

Once inside, Mickey paces back and forth like a bulldog, glaring at Ian. His fists are clenched and he’s obviously restraining himself with every bit of willpower he has.

‘What’s your problem, Mick?’ Ian asks, stepping closer to him.

 _‘Don’t._ Fucking don’t.’ Mickey wipes a hand down his face, pinches the bridge of his nose.

‘Excuse me for clearing the zombies out from the front of your house,’ Ian says, his temper rising.

‘At six in the fucking morning?’ Mickey seethes. ‘By yourself. With a fucking _baseball bat._ ’

Ian shrugs. ‘It’s worked out for me so far.’

‘They were all fucking over you! You nearly…’ Mickey cuts himself off with a sharp intake of breath.

‘I was fine.’

‘You were _fine_ because I came out and rescued you. Fuck, if I hadn’t woken up...’ Mickey stops pacing, moves into Ian’s personal space, grabs his head and looks him in the eye. ‘Come on, Ian, you know what’s going on, right? Just… just fucking tell me you know what this is.’

Ian tries to avoid Mickey’s gaze, looks around at the meticulously organized food and weapons, suddenly realizes how bitterly cold he is after running around outside without a coat. Reluctantly, he looks back at Mickey’s face, looks past the anger and sees how fucking scared Mickey is.

‘You think I don’t know?’ Ian says at last. Abruptly, he shoves Mickey away. ‘I’ve been off my meds for months. You think I don’t fucking know what this is? Fuck you, Mick. _Fuck you.’_

‘Ian…’ Mickey reaches out, but Ian flinches away.

‘Don’t you fucking dare, don’t you _dare_ condescend to me about _my_ fucking disease.’ Ian is so enraged he’s nearly blind with it, his brain feverish and sparking. ‘You don’t know shit, Mickey.’

‘I know you’re acting fucking nuts!’ Mickey retorts, and immediately looks like he regrets it. But Ian is viciously glad. Now he knows what Mickey really thinks about him. He shoves past Mickey, shoulder checks him, heads for Mandy’s room.

‘I’m getting Yevgeny,’ he announces. ‘We’re leaving.’

‘Like hell you are!’ Mickey says, darting in front of him, blocking Ian’s path. ‘If you think I’m letting you take my kid…’

 _‘Your_ kid? Your fucking kid?’ Ian laughs wildly, grabs a fistful of Mickey’s shirt, shoves him up hard against the doorframe, his heart pounding in his chest. ‘You don’t give a shit about that kid! _I’m_ the one who found him. _I’m_ the one who kept him alive when everything was falling apart. You have _no_ idea what it was like, looking after him while I was losing my fucking mind.’ He pulls Mickey forward and then slams him against the wall again for emphasis, ignoring the grimace of pain on Mickey’s face. ‘You just think I’m crazy. You want to take him away from me. Well I won’t let you, I won’t let you…’

He’s interrupted by a sudden wail from behind the door. Their fight has woken Yevgeny up. Ian glares at Mickey, but Mickey is leaning back against the wall looking shaken and defeated, so Ian shoves him to one side and barges into the bedroom.

‘Hey, little man,’ he says, grinning widely, swooping down to pick up the toddler, sitting on the bed and letting Yev stand on his knees, brushing tears away from his red face. ‘Did we wake you? I’m sorry. You want some breakfast?’

Yev sticks his bottom lip out, reaches out with both arms, and Ian obligingly pulls him into a hug. Yev buries his face in Ian’s shoulder, sniffling and wiping snot on the thin material of his T-shirt, the moisture immediately soaking through. Ian rocks the kid gently from side to side, makes nonsensical shushing noises while Yevgeny slows calms down. Finally, Ian looks up.

Mickey is standing in the doorway. He looks wrecked. One arm is folded tightly around his body, and with his other hand he’s covering his mouth. His eyes are wet.

‘I would never hurt Yevgeny,’ Ian says, quietly. ‘Never.’

Mickey slowly lowers his hand, nods, one tear spilling down his cheek with the motion. ‘Yeah,’ he says in a long breath. ‘Yeah, I’m getting that.’

He steps into the room, gets down on one knee in front of Ian and Yev, Ian watching him distrustfully the whole time. Mickey reaches out as if to pat Yev’s back, hesitates, then drops his hand to Ian’s knee, rubbing gently with his thumb.

‘You’re sick, Ian,’ he says, but it sounds more like a question than an accusation.

Ian sighs, nods. His mind is still spinning, a million ideas and inspirations whirling around. He feels like Dorothy, caught up in the eye of tornado, unable to slow down or make sense of anything. ‘Yeah,’ he agrees hoarsely.

Mickey clenches his jaw. The lines on his face look deep, aging him prematurely. ‘What can I do?’ he asks, audibly making an effort to keep his voice steady. ‘What do you need?’

Ian shrugs, jostling Yevgeny. ‘Just be here, man. It’s all you can do.’

Mickey nods. He looks exhausted. ‘Don’t fucking leave,’ he blurts out.

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Ian assures him.

‘You’re always fucking…’ Mickey cuts himself off, covering his mouth like it just betrayed him.

Ian reaches out with one hand, cups Mickey’s face, rubs his cheek soothingly. Mickey turns his head, presses a kiss into Ian’s palm.

‘Here,’ Ian says, standing up. Mickey follows him quickly. ‘Can you watch Yevgeny while I make us some breakfast?’

Mickey looks at the kid, a little nervously. ‘Yeah. Sure.’

Ian hands Yev over to Mickey, who holds him at arm’s length at first, uncertain. When Ian reaches the door and looks back, though, he sees Mickey sitting down with Yev on the floor, cross-legged, casting around for something to entertain the kid with. He finds a discarded weed grinder under Mandy’s bed and shows it to Yevgeny, who looks pretty intrigued.

Ian smiles. Mickey notices him lingering in the doorway, looks up, smirks tentatively.

‘Fuck you looking at?’ he asks.

Ian’s still raw and rattled from their fight, but he laughs, flips Mickey off, and secretly dares to believe that the three of them just might make it through this thing alive.


	12. Day One Hundred and Twenty

Mickey trudges through the snow, watching the buildings warily. The streets around the Milkovich house are mostly cleared out in a pretty wide radius thanks to Mickey’s guys killing every zombie dumb enough to drift onto their turf, but out here things are more dangerous. Mickey heard there was a gang out here a few weeks back, trying to make it, but they got overrun and massacred. He doesn’t intend to be next on the menu.

‘There,’ he says, gesturing with the barrel of the rifle he’s holding across his body. ‘Drug store. Looks like there’s still some shit left over.’

Iggy squints at the building, with its fallen-down sign and smashed windows. He spits on the ground. ‘I dunno, Mickey. Looks pretty cleaned out.’

‘I thought we were looking for ammo, anyway,’ pipes up Pete Abramovich, who Mickey has also brought along on this excursion. He’s younger than his brother, and much stupider, but he’s a crack shot.

‘We’re looking for whatever we can find, dumbass,’ Mickey snaps.

Iggy snorts. ‘You just wanna look for crazy pills for your crazy boyfriend.’

Mickey stops short, rounds on Iggy, gets right up in his face. ‘You shut your fucking mouth,’ he says in a low, dangerous voice. ‘Ain’t no cops around no more. I could shoot you in the face and not have to worry about burying the body.’

Iggy just laughs. Threatening murder is an old Milkovich family tradition, and Mickey’s been threatening to kill Iggy since he was about five years old. ‘Whatever. Maybe there’ll be some oxy in there, make it worth my while.’

‘That’s the fucking spirit.’

He leads the way into the drug store, glass crunching underfoot as he crosses the threshold. There’s not much left on the shelves, probably because the failed gang that was living here cleaned it out, but Mickey ducks down and searches in the dusty space underneath them. He finds a half-empty box of energy bars, shoves it in his backpack. They’re starting to run low on food. In the next aisle he finds the shelf toppled over, with a zombie underneath it - crushed, but still moving. He crouches down and mechanically stabs it in the head with his knife.

That taken care of, he gathers up the fallen stuff around the zombie. It’s not much - a few packets of aspirin, some cold meds - but at this point anything they can find is worth grabbing.

He hears a whoop from the other side of the store and stands up, whips around, marches over to where Iggy is standing, flicking through a crumpled magazine. ‘Hey, you wanna keep the fucking noise down?’ Mickey snaps.

Iggy just grins at him stupidly, flips the magazine open to the centerfold and holds it up right in Mickey’s face. He finds himself staring at a glistening, spread vagina and a blonde with huge tits, pulls a face and bats the magazine to the floor. ‘Gah, get that shit outta my face!’

Iggy bends down and picks the magazine up again, muttering, ‘You’re so fucking gay.’

Mickey flips him off.

The three of them head to the back of the store, and Mickey vaults over the pharmacist counter. He sweeps under the counter first, looking for prescriptions that were filled and never collected, finds one of those little white bags. He rips it open, shakes the pills out, peers at them.

‘Anything good?’ Pete Abramovich asks.

Mickey snorts. ‘Viagra. Great. If we run out of food we can eat our boners.’ He sees Iggy grin slowly out of the corner of his eye and adds, ‘Don’t fucking say it.’

As Iggy and Pete turn away, Mickey quietly pockets the viagra. If he finds the pills that Ian needs and Ian has the same problems as before, then at least they’ll have the solution. And if he doesn’t find the pills that Ian needs… well, Mickey might need the boner pills just to keep up with Ian’s sexual appetite when he’s manic.

A lot of the drawers have been pulled out and are lying on the floor. All of the opiates are gone, much to Iggy’s disappointment, but they’re fortunate that the pills Ian needs aren’t the kind of shit that people get high on. Mickey finds a whole drawer full of olanzapine, counts the pills… there’s gotta be enough to last Ian a few months. He slings his backpack of his shoulder and shoves the pills in, his mind racing. If he can just get his hands on some lithium as well…

Mickey moves over to the next set of shelves. He can hear Iggy and Pete talking quietly somewhere nearby. He steps over a dead body that’s slumped against the wall, runs his fingers over the drawers of pills. They’re mostly undisturbed back here, and there’s some good shit. Mickey might just take this all back with him.

Finally, he spots it: lithium. It’s on a lower shelf and Mickey grins in triumph, leans over to grab it, jostling the dead body with his foot.

And that’s when he finds out that it’s not just a dead body.

The zombie opens its eyes and a vicious snarl rips through the air, grabs Mickey’s ankle with its bony, supernaturally strong fingers. He’s off-balance, falls over backwards, and the zombie surges forward like some horrible sea beast dragging itself out of the ocean, pulls itself up Mickey’s body, its mouth open, the skin on its face tearing as it stretches its jaw.

‘Fuck!’ Mickey yells, fumbling for his knife. _‘Iggy!’_

The zombie is a terrible weight on him and it smells, oh _god,_ it smells so bad. Its eyes are pale, misty globes rolling in its dried-out face. It lunges at Mickey’s throat and he punches it hard in the face, wrestles with it, finally gets his knife out from under him. He holds it off with his forearm, summons all his strength, and finally rams his knife _hard_ into the top of its ugly head.

The zombie falls limp, sprawled over Mickey’s legs and torso.

He shoves it off. His heart is pounding. His ears are ringing.

There’s a bloody tear on his right sleeve.

Mickey stands up slowly, shakily, his gun and backpack forgotten on the floor. He takes hold of his sleeve with his left hand, hisses in pain as he pulls it back, exposing the skin.

And there it is. Unmistakeable. Two red semicircles, the marks of uneven teeth, oozing where the skin has been broken.

Iggy and Pete finally round the corner. They stop short when they see Mickey holding his bleeding arm, his right hand shaking violently.

Suddenly, Mickey is furious.

He stamps down hard on the zombie’s head, feeling it give way under his shoe. He clenches his trembling fist and smashes it into the wall of drawers, his knuckles splitting under the impact. He’s yelling something, doesn’t know what it is. Why didn’t he check the fucking body? What a fucking _retarded_ way to die. This isn’t fucking fair, it’s not _fucking fair._

Slowly, Mickey becomes aware of the fact that Pete Abramovich is pointing a gun at his head. That fucking dead-eye aim.

Then Iggy’s knocking Pete’s arm down, shoving him angrily.

‘We gotta shoot him,’ Pete’s saying in this dumb, high-pitched, panicky voice. ‘He’s gonna turn, we gotta shoot him!’

‘You’re not fucking shooting him,’ Iggy snaps. ‘He’s my brother. If anyone’s gonna shoot him, it’s me.’

‘Oh please, just stand around having a fucking debate about who’s gonna shoot me,’ Mickey snaps. ‘Why don’t you take fucking turns?’

‘Pete, go watch the door,’ Iggy says, shoving the younger Abramovich brother to get him moving.

‘But…’

‘Fucking _go._ Jesus, can we get a bit of privacy for this? Imagine if it was Luke.’

Pete hesitates, glances at Mickey worriedly, then throws his arms up in defeat and stalks away.

Iggy and Mickey are left behind, neither one of them meeting the other’s eye.

‘Fuck,’ Mickey says at last. He pulls open the drawer that he was reaching for when he got bit, starts grabbing lithium and shoving it into his bag. Shit, if he’s gonna die for this then he’d better actually get it. Once he has it all he zips the bag up and kicks it over to Iggy.

The fever is already setting in. Mickey feels a burning sensation spreading out from the bite mark, climbing up his arm. He glares at Iggy.

‘You fucking take care of Ian,’ he says fiercely. ‘You look after Ian and my kid, you understand? You make sure… Iggy, are you crying?’

‘No!’ Iggy sniffs defiantly, rubbing his filthy sleeve across his eyes.

‘You are, you fucking _pussy.’_

‘You’re the pussy, faggot!’

‘Who you calling a faggot, bitch?’ Mickey lurches forward, shoves Iggy hard, making him stumble. Iggy shoves him back, and Mickey gets hit by a wave of dizziness, trips backwards over the zombie and lands hard, pain ringing through his tailbone.

‘Mickey?’ Iggy says nervously, inching closer as Mickey wearily props himself up against the wall.

‘Ah,’ Mickey says, wincing as he tries to shift into a more comfortable position. ‘I think I broke my ass.’

To his surprise, Iggy doesn’t make a joke about that. He crouches down next to Mickey, his grubby face and bad breath way too close.

‘What do I do, Mickey?’ he asks, sounding all dopey.

‘You know what to fucking do.’ Mickey replies wearily.

‘No but like… what do I _do?_ What do I tell the guys?’

‘Figure something out, shit, I don’t know. Ask Ian. He’s smart. He’s so fucking smart, Ig…’ Oh great, now Mickey’s getting choked up.

Iggy sniffs, looks down at the pistol in his hands. He raises it slowly, presses the cold barrel against Mickey’s feverish temple. Mickey sucks in a sharp breath, trying to clamp down on his panic.

‘Wait, wait, wait, wait…’ he says, pushing the gun away. ‘Fuck it, just go.’

‘What?’ Iggy says, clearly trying to hide his relief.

‘Fucking _go._ I’m not getting shot by my own brother. I’d rather be a zombie. I wanna bite some motherfuckers.’

‘Don’t bite _me,’_ Iggy whines stupidly, pulling back.

‘Then get outta here, Iggy, Jesus Christ. Take my gun. And the pills, don’t forget the pills.’

Reluctantly, Iggy stands up. He grabs Mickey’s rifle, picks up the backpack. Looks back at Mickey and hesitates.

‘You want me to tell Ian anything?’ he asks.

Mickey closes his eyes wearily. His head is pounding. Shit, he’s not in the right state of mind to be coming up with touching last words. Dying sucks.

‘Just… try to think of something nice on the way back and tell him I said that.’ A sudden wave of shivers wracks his body and Mickey hisses through his teeth. ‘You’d better go,’ he warns.

Iggy spares one look back at him, opens his mouth as if he’s about to say something, then shuts it again. Mickey nods at him in what he hopes is a reassuring way, and finally Iggy leaves.

Without Iggy there, Mickey starts to lose track of time. His arm hurts so, so bad. His whole body aches and he feels like he’s drowning in sweat, like every drop of moisture in his body is leaving him. He tries to think nice, peaceful thoughts about Ian and Yev, but he can’t do it. Mickey’s just so fucking _angry._

They should put that on his gravestone. “Here lies Mickey Milkovich. He died as he lived: fucking pissed off.”


	13. Day One Hundred and Twenty, Part Two

Ian wakes up first, as he usually does. The dawn light is just peeking through the barricaded windows, lighting Mickey’s bare shoulders and the side of his face. Ian knows he should let Mickey sleep, but his body and brain feel electric, and the longer he stares at Mickey’s sleeping form, the tighter that feeling of urgency and hunger coils inside him. He shifts closer, presses his erection against Mickey’s bare ass, fits his mouth to that sensitive spot behind Mickey’s ear, feels him start to wake up.

‘Morning,’ Ian rumbles, rolling his hips slowly, savoring the feel of it.

‘Mmmm…’ Mickey groans grumpily, rubbing his face against the pillow. ‘F’ckin’ barely.’

Ian chuckles, slides down the hand that’s lying across Mickey’s body, rubs at the base of his soft cock, presses his fingers against Mickey’s taint in a gentle massage, then cups his balls - all the while keeping up the slow roll of his hips. When he finally wraps a hand around Mickey’s dick, he finds it chubbing up nicely as Mickey starts to shift into the movement.

‘Fuuuck,’ Mickey complains. ‘You’re a goddamn menace. ‘M tryin’ to sleep here.’

‘I know a good way to wake up,’ Ian says slyly.

Mickey gives an exasperated chuckle. ‘Yevgeny?’ he asks.

Ian glances over at the makeshift cot they’ve made up in the corner of the room. ‘Sleeping.’

‘Alright for some.’

Knowing that Mickey isn’t yet awake enough to reciprocate, Ian moves back a little, tugs on his boyfriend’s hip to turn him over on his back. Mickey yawns widely, stretches, pulling his torso taut. Ian loves seeing him like this, all loose and sleepy and pliant. He gently bites the thick muscle of Mickey’s shoulder, moves down to briefly press his face into Mickey’s hairy armpit, breathe him in. He mouths at Mickey’s nipple, massages it with the flat of his tongue as Mickey shifts his legs restlessly, spreading them, pushing his pelvis up insistently. Ian takes his time, though, kisses his way down Mickey’s chest, his stomach, dipping his tongue into Mickey’s navel.

'Quit being a bitch and suck my fuckin’ dick,’ Mickey growls.

‘Rude,’ Ian retorts, but he’s smiling as he says it. He takes hold of Mickey’s dick, now rock hard and leaking at the tip. He rolls the foreskin up until it covers the head, dips down and runs his tongue around the inside of it, salt spreading across his tastebuds. Mickey sighs, reaches down, runs his fingers through Ian’s hair.

‘Yeah,’ he mutters. ‘Yeah, that’s nice.’

Ian takes his time blowing Mickey. He hasn’t done this since before Mickey went to jail, and he’d forgotten how much he enjoys it. He presses a couple of fingers inside Mickey, finds the right spot, flexes them rhythmically until Mickey is thrusting shamelessly into his mouth, his fingers gripping Ian’s hair tightly. Not long after that Mickey falls still, making quiet, desperate noises as he floods Ian’s mouth, then sinks into the mattress, shaking minutely.

When he’s sure that Mickey is done, Ian swallows his load, props himself up on one hand, rubbing his hard-on with the other. He stares at the pale lines of Mickey’s stomach and chest and asks, softly, ‘Can I come on you, Mick? I really wanna come on you, fuck.’

‘Pervert,’ Mickey grumbles, his eyes closed. ‘Go on, then.’

Ian straddles Mickey’s hips, jerks himself fast and efficiently, brings himself to the edge. He’s aiming for Mickey’s chest, but he underestimates just how hard he’s about to come, and the first burst of it shoots up higher, lands on Mickey’s face.

‘Ahhh!’ Mickey grouses, swiping the come from his closed eyelid. ‘I didn’t say you could come on my fuckin’ face.’

But Ian is too turned on by the sight of it to apologize. He gasps, still coming, drops his head down and presses his open mouth against Mickey’s pectoral as he shoots violently onto Mickey’s stomach, rubbing the head of his cock in the mess, shivering all over. When he finally collapses, sprawled on top of Mickey, Mickey reaches down and swipes his hand through the fluid on his belly, and then smears it on Ian’s cheek.

‘There,’ he mumbles. ‘See how you fuckin’ like it.’

‘Feels good,’ Ian replies, grinning against Mickey’s chest.

‘Pervert.’

Mickey goes back to sleep for a couple more hours after that, but Ian is wide awake, brimming over with energy. He gets up and spends an hour melting snow until there’s enough to fill the Milkoviches’ kitchen sink with warm water, then gives Yevgeny a bath, laughing as the toddler splashes water onto the floor. Ian dries him off carefully, dresses him in warm clothes, and puts him in Mandy’s room. He meets Mickey, newly awakened, coming out of their bedroom and drags him back inside, kissing him hungrily until Mickey relents and presses Ian down onto the bed, rides him quick and dirty, his hands braced on Ian’s bent knees as Ian jerks him off.

After, Mickey pulls his jeans up over his bare ass, staggers out of the bedroom on wobbly legs. Ian watches him, wonders how long it’ll be before he can fuck Mickey again, or maybe even have Mickey fuck him for the first time. It’s like he’s starving for it, can’t get enough.

Reluctantly, Ian pulls his clothes on, leaves the bedroom with still-damp skin and hair sticking up at the back. Iggy is sitting on the couch, eating cereal dry from the box, his mouth hanging half-open full of chewed food when he sees Ian emerge all loose-limbed and grinning. ‘C’n you not?’ he mumbles.

‘Can’t help it if your brother’s got an ass that just won’t quit,’ Ian retorts with a wink.

Iggy gags.

‘What are you saying about my ass?’ Mickey asks, coming down the stairs, his hair still deliciously rumpled.

‘Just won’t quit,’ Ian repeats, swaying towards Mickey and planting a kiss on his cheek as he passes.

Mickey makes a visible effort to smother his grin as he says, ‘Need you to watch Yev today. Me and Iggy and Pete are gonna go look for more supplies.’

‘No problem, I got lots of stuff I can get done here. Hey, I’m thinking of learning to play guitar.’

Mickey’s shoulders stiffen a little. ‘Got your priorities in order, huh?’

‘Yeah, I mean I figure it’s up to us to preserve civilization, right? That includes the arts. They’re so important. Music is like, what makes us human. And I figure I love listening to music, I should learn to make some. And I could teach Yev too, when he grows up.’

‘Right.’ Mickey grabs his rifle from the cupboard, checks the magazine.

Ian is aware that he’s talking too much, too fast, but can’t seem to stop. ‘I’ve been writing down a bunch of lyrics for songs, and I don’t really know, like, the notes and stuff, but in my head I know exactly how I want it to sound. I can practice on your guitar, you don’t mind, right? Hey, maybe you can teach me to play! We could start a band, like a post-apocalyptic band. All the real bands are probably dead now so there’s not much competition, even if we sound kind of shitty at first, we can still hit the top of the charts. Hey, Iggy, you play any instruments?’

‘Nooope,’ Iggy says slowly, looking at Mickey, who won’t meet his eye.

‘Alright, Ian Van Halen, I gotta head out,’ Mickey says, grabbing his jacket and backpack from the couch. ‘If you got time in between concerts, think you can check the traps, see if we caught anything?’

‘Sure,’ Ian says, smiling broadly. ‘Stay safe.’

Mickey pats him on the shoulder on his way out the door. ‘I’ll be back before you know it.’

* * *

Mickey and Iggy are gone for a long time. Ian cleans the house as best he can, takes an inventory of their supplies, checks the traps and finds a scrawny feral fox that he brings inside, skins and guts. They can eat it for dinner tonight.

‘Daddy, gotta poop!’ Yevgeny announces as Ian is cutting off hunks of lean meat.

‘Is that right, little man?’ Ian says, picking Yev up and carrying him out to the latrine that he dug in the back yard a few days ago. He’s been potty training Yev and it’s going OK, though the kid has wet the bed a couple of times since they got here.

As he wipes Yev’s bottom with old newspaper, Ian hears the front door slam, smiles, eager to see Mickey again. When he gets back inside the house, though, Mickey isn’t there. Just Iggy, sitting on the couch and taking a long drag from his crack pipe with shaking fingers.

‘What’s up, Iggy?’ Ian asks, bouncing Yev on his hip. ‘Where’s Mickey?’

Iggy doesn’t reply. Holding the smoke in his lungs, he leans down, grabs something from the floor, and throws it violently at Ian, who barely manages to grab it before it hits Yev.

‘The fuck?’ he snaps, raising his voice. He looks down. He’s holding Mickey’s backpack. Slowly, Ian feels the edges of panic start to creep in. ‘Where’s Mickey?’ he asks again.

Iggy coughs harshly, smoke curling around his face, glares up at Ian. ‘Your crazy pills are in there,’ he sneers. ‘Hope it was fucking worth it.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ Ian demands. ‘Iggy, where’s _Mickey?’_

‘Mickey’s dead, man, he’s fucking dead. He got bit.’

Ian just stands there for a moment, holding Yev so tight that the kid starts to whine. The words _Mickey’s dead_ are ringing in his head. He feels that chaos of thoughts, that core of craziness inside him, spinning into a crescendo. ‘Where is he?’ he whispers at last.

Iggy takes another hit from the crack pipe, his shoulders slumped in defeat. ‘CVS over on Rockwell,’ he mutters. ‘Fuck, it all went down so fast. Shit.’

‘And you just left him there?’ Ian yells, dumping Yevgeny on the couch, rounding on Iggy with his fists clenched.

‘Couldn’t do nothing for him,’ Iggy whines defensively. ‘He said… he said to tell you… to tell you…’ Iggy takes a deep breath. ‘“You made me want to be a better man.” That’s what he said.’

There’s a beat of silence. Then Ian says, ‘Is that from that fucking Jack Nicholson movie?’

‘No!’ Iggy says quickly, but he’s not meeting Ian’s eye.

‘It is! That’s from, what’s it called, _As Good As It Gets._ Did Mickey really say that, or did you just pull that outta your ass?’

‘He told me to tell you something nice!’

‘Fuck you, Iggy! And fuck him, I swear to god…’ And with that, Ian is running out of the house, not bothering to grab his coat, running down the street, tears streaming from his eyes. He doesn’t have a plan, doesn’t know what he’s doing. All he knows is that he’s not going to leave Mickey behind, has to see for himself, has to be sure that Mickey’s dead and there’s nothing he can do.

It takes him twenty minutes to reach the drug store on Rockwell. He stops, stares at the dilapidated store front, presses a hand over his mouth as he stares into its gloomy interior.

‘Mickey?’ Ian calls out, stepping inside. There’s no answer.

He searches up and down the empty aisles, his mind spinning in dizzying circles. He doesn’t have a weapon. If Mickey is here, if he’s… if he’s turned, Ian has no way of defending himself. Maybe he doesn’t want to.

Finally, Ian remembers the backpack full of pills, decides to check behind the pharmacist’s counter. He hauls himself over, drops down the other side. He realizes, vaguely, that he’s shivering. It’s freezing in here, with barely any protection from the elements.

Mickey’s body is lying in the last row of shelves. When Ian finds him, the sight hits him like a sucker punch to the gut and he sinks down to one knee, trying and failing to draw breath, his eyes brimming over with tears.

‘No, Mick,’ he pleads. Just two words. That’s all he can manage.

Screwing up all of his remaining strength, Ian crawls over to Mickey, kicking the remains of the zombie that bit him aside in anger. He sits down opposite Mickey, leans back against the shelf, just stares. Mickey’s arm is laid out limply, the red bite marks stark on his pale skin. His chin is resting on his chest. He looks like a statue, like one of those bodies preserved at Pompeii after the volcano.

Hopelessness and grief weigh down heavy in Ian’s chest. He thought he’d prepared himself for the possibility of Mickey dying, all those months alone with Yev. But it’s different now. Ian had Mickey back, he _had_ him, for a whole week. And now Mickey is in front of him, dead. Because of Ian. Because Ian was acting crazy. Because he couldn’t get his shit under control. Because Mickey took a stupid risk to get those pills.

And suddenly, Ian makes a decision. He’s not going back to the house. He’s not moving from this spot. He’s going to wait for Mickey to come back, and then he’s going to let Mickey bite him, and then they’ll be together again. They’ll both be undead, sure, but they’ll be together. The zombies have fucking won, anyway. It’s only a matter of time before everyone in the world is a zombie. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

He sits there for what feels like a long time, watching for the first twitches that will signify Mickey’s return. It’s taking a long time. Suddenly, Ian has a panicked thought: what if Mickey is immune? What if he’s not coming back? What if he’s just dead, the normal kind of dead, and Ian is all alone?

‘Come on,’ he mutters, suddenly furious. ‘Come on, you piece of shit. Come on, you fucking asshole. Wake up. Wake up, Mickey. Wake _up.’_

With that final command Ian surges forward in anger, grabs Mickey by the throat.

Stops.

Mickey is _hot._

His body should be cold by now, but his skin is feverish, burning. His heart thudding painfully in his chest, Ian presses two fingers against Mickey’s throat, holds his breath, not daring to hope.

But there it is. A pulse.

‘Mickey?’ Ian whispers, tears spilling down his cheeks. He grabs Mickey’s shoulders, shakes him. ‘Mickey?’

Mickey groans. Not an inhuman snarl of hunger; a human groan of pain and weariness. His eyelids flutter.

‘Oh my god, oh my god, Mick.’ Ian cradles Mickey’s face, kisses his forehead, pinches his cheek and sees blood rushing obligingly to the surface. Mickey groans again, and his eyes open a little.

‘Ian?’ he croaks weakly, confused.

‘Yeah, yeah, it’s me, I’m here.’

‘Go ‘way,’ Mickey mumbles. ‘Gonna… turn.’

‘You haven’t yet, Mickey. Maybe you won’t. Maybe…’ Ian looks around desperately, but all he sees is his own panted breaths hanging in the air. Something hits him, a possible explanation. ‘I think it’s the cold, Mick. I saw a guy turn real fast, right after this all kicked off, but that was back in the summer. I think the cold is keeping your fever down. If you can just fight it off… hang on.’

Ian stands up abruptly, starts searching through the drawers, yanking them out altogether and letting them tumble to the floor. There’s got to be something here, there’s got to be something…

‘The zombie thing, it’s got to be bacterial or viral, right? So we need broad spectrum antibiotics and… and… where is it. Shit, got some!’ Ian grabs a fistful of small cardboard boxes, shows them to Mickey. ‘This is tenofovir, it’s an antiviral, used to treat HIV and hepatitis.’

He isn’t sure if Mickey is even still awake, but then Mickey says faintly, ‘You wanna give me fuckin’ AIDS drugs?’

‘What’s the worst that could happen, right?’

Mickey closes his eyes again wearily as Ian crouches down in front of him, clutching the pills. ‘You gotta go,’ Mickey breathes. Ian hates how defeated he sounds, how unlike himself.

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he says fiercely.

‘Ian.’ Mickey opens his eyes again, visibly struggling to focus on Ian’s face. ‘It’s OK.’

‘It’s not fucking OK. You’re not dying, Mickey. If you die, I’m gonna stick around until you wake up as a zombie and bite me. You want that on your conscience?’

There’s a spark of anger in Mickey’s eyes. ‘Fuck you,’ he says, his voice a little stronger. ‘I’m tryin’ to fucking die in peace and you’re talkin’ about stuffing me full of drugs.’

‘You’re not dying on me, Mickey! Not now. You were still alive when I got here, so there must be, like, a _cosmic_ reason for that. I’m supposed to save you.’

‘Nothin’s s’posed to happen.’ Mickey squeezes his eyes tightly shut, and Ian sees a tear roll down his cheek. ‘None o’ this was s’posed to happen. Fuck, it hurts so bad…’

‘And it’ll probably hurt worse before it gets better, but it will get better. It _has_ to.’

‘That’s the fuckin’ disease talking, Ian.’ Mickey’s fading now, his speech soft and verging on incoherent. Suddenly, Ian is furious.

‘That’s _me_ talking, Mickey! It’s me!’

Mickey doesn’t answer. He’s slipped into unconsciousness again. Ian grits his teeth, grabs Mickey by his bitten arm, pulls him over his shoulders into a fireman’s lift and stands up. His legs shake under the weight, still weak, but the mania lends him extra strength. Ian is going to get Mickey back to the house and he’s going to save his life, or they’re both going to die out here. Those are the only options.


	14. Day One Hundred and Twenty One

Mickey is only vaguely aware during the trip back to the house. Most of the time he’s unconscious, having a nightmare about being on a ship on stormy seas, swaying and plunging and vomiting overboard. The vomiting part is real, he thinks. He remembers distinctly the sight of his stomach contents hitting the snow, steaming, Ian saying something soothing.

The next time Mickey is properly conscious he’s lying in his own bed, blinking drowsily at the tattered old posters on his wall. Ian is holding a bottle to his lips, and there’s water spilling out of the corners of Mickey’s mouth, trickling down his chin.

‘Come on, Mickey, you need to drink,’ Ian is pleading. ‘You’re dehydrated. You need to take the pills.’

‘Leave me alone,’ Mickey tries to say, but it comes out as an incoherent wheeze of breath.

Ian smooths a hand over Mickey’s sweaty forehead, cups the back of his head to hold him up.

‘Drink, Mickey,’ he insists gently. ‘Just a few sips and then I’ll let you sleep.’

Mickey closes his eyes, relaxes his parched throat, lets the water trickle in slowly. It tastes bitter, metallic.

‘Good, good.’ Mickey hears a quiet rattle, and then feels Ian’s fingers at his mouth, pressing something small and round inside. He grimaces, but manages to swallow the pill.

Ian is a dirty liar, doesn’t let Mickey stop drinking after a few sips. He makes him drink the whole bottle, murmuring encouragement, stroking Mickey’s cheek with his thumb. Only when the bottle is empty does Ian lower Mickey’s head back onto the pillow, kiss his forehead, and let him drift back into unconsciousness.

The next time he wakes up, it’s because of a gunshot. The noise rattles around his aching head, making him groan. His skin is burning and he kicks the blanket off the bed, trying to get more cool air on his skin. There are people yelling outside, then another gunshot, then he hears an engine revving and tires squealing.

With great effort, Mickey rolls off the bed, staggers, lands on all fours. Exhausted, his head pounding and the bite mark on his arm stinging fiercely, he pulls open his bedroom door, leans heavily against the doorframe. Iggy is standing guard outside, holding a shotgun, and jumps in alarm when the door opens.

‘Ig,’ Mickey croaks, struggling to focus on Iggy’s face. ‘Wass goan on?’

‘Get back to bed,’ Iggy says, glancing at Mickey nervously, backing away when Mickey sways unsteadily.

‘Who’s fucken shootin’?’ Mickey blunders on. There are two Iggys in front of him, overlapping, their outlines blurred.

Iggy glances at the door, chews the inside of his lip. ‘Fucking Pete Abramovich saw Ian bring you back,’ he explains. ‘They’re trying to get inside. Say it’s too dangerous to have you here. Say we gotta put you down.’

A wave of nausea rolls over Mickey. ‘Fucken assholes,’ he mumbles.

The front door slams and in his peripheral vision Mickey sees a blurry shape topped with orange hair march back into the house. Ian stops when he sees Mickey and demands, ‘What the hell is he doing out of bed?’

Iggy just shrugs.

Mickey’s fingers slip on the door frame and he’s falling to the floor when Ian reaches him, catches him, hauls him back up. ‘Jesus, Mick, you need to rest,’ he scolds, dragging Mickey back into the bedroom and dropping him onto the mattress, lifting his legs up and laying them out flat on the bed, trying to pull the blanket back up. Mickey peers groggily at him, sees that Ian’s face is bruised and he’s bleeding from a cut above his eye.

‘Y’hurt,’ he mumbles.

‘I’m fine,’ Ian says shortly. He rests the back of his fingers against Mickey’s hot forehead, clenches his jaw. Then he’s trying to get Mickey to drink more water, tipping the bottle against his lips, pressing them apart with his thumb.

Mickey turns his head, resists, so that the water spills on his cheek. ‘Stop,’ he moans.

Ian’s face is out of focus, but Mickey can hear the frustration in his voice when he pleads, ‘Just drink the water. Why do you have to fight me on everything?’

Mickey is so, so tired and everything hurts so much. He’s never been in this much pain before. He’s never felt this sick. It’s like his entire body is rejecting life, trying to throw it out forcibly. ‘Do it,’ he murmurs faintly.

‘What?’

Mickey jerks his head vaguely towards the window. ‘Give ‘em what… they want.’

He hears Ian suck in his breath sharply. ‘Don’t say that.’

‘Dyin’ anyway.’

‘You’re not dying!’

Mickey starts to laugh, the claim that he’s not dying hilarious in the face of all the evidence that he is, but the laugh turns into a wheezy cough that depletes him of breath, fogs up his brain. He slips back under, welcoming the escape from the pain.

He figures it must be a long sleep, because when Mickey next wakes up it’s dark outside. There’s gunfire rattling outside, yelling, snarls. All the noise must have attracted some zombies back into the area. Mickey tries to listen, to figure out what’s going on. He notices that Ian has left the water bottle on the bedside table and forces himself to sit up, to laboriously unscrew the cap, to hold it to his lips with a shaking hand and take a few sips. It trickles down his throat, cool and soothing, makes him shiver all over.

Things are quiet outside now. Mickey hears the front door slam shut again, and a few seconds later Ian stumbles into the room, shuts the door behind him. He doesn’t come over to the bed, though. He moves away, disappears from view. Mickey makes an effort to move his head, squints into the darkness, sees Ian sitting on the floor in front of the dresser, his head in his hands.

‘Hey,’ Mickey whispers hoarsely, his voice so quiet that he isn’t even sure if Ian can hear him.

Ian doesn’t respond. It looks like his shoulders are shaking. Mickey can hear him taking short, shallow breaths.

Then Ian says, ‘I need to borrow a shirt.’

Mickey blinks a few times, trying to focus his vision. He sees Ian slowly pull his shirt up over his head, exposing the pale skin of his torso. He handles the shirt tentatively, grabs a plastic bag from the floor and shoves it inside, tosses the bag into a corner. Then he starts searching through Mickey’s drawers, finds an old band T-shirt, pulls it on. That done, he braces both hands on the dresser and just leans on it, still presenting Mickey with only his back.

Fighting off pain and exhaustion, Mickey says Ian’s name.

Ian takes a couple of deep breaths, like he’s trying to steady himself. He straightens up, walks stiffly over to the bed.

‘Yev?’ Mickey mutters, starting to panic a little now, with what little emotional energy he has.

‘Fine. Iggy’s fine too.’

Ian sits down on the edge of the bed, then lies down next to Mickey. There’s a little moonlight filtering into the room and it strikes Ian’s face, and that’s when Mickey sees the blood. It’s smeared all up Ian’s left cheek, soaked into his hair, turning it spiky. There’s what looks like a reddish handprint drying on his throat. Mickey wants to reach out, to check Ian over, to make sure he’s OK, but he doesn’t even have the strength to lift his arm. Besides, Ian doesn’t seem to be injured. Just upset.

Slowly, Ian curls into Mickey’s side. His skin is very cold, and the material of Mickey’s old T-shirt is soft and worn, but Ian doesn’t move to pull the blanket over himself. He presses his mouth against Mickey’s shoulder, breathes him in.

‘We’re safe,’ he says at last. ‘I took care of it.’

Mickey nods. Closes his eyes. Drifts back to sleep.


	15. Day One Hundred and Twenty Seven

Ian knows for sure that Mickey is going to live the day he wakes up and grumpily asks for a cigarette. He still looks like shit, lying sprawled in the bed in a yellowing shirt soaked with layers of sweat, his hair limp and skin pallid, but he’s capable of expressing anger again. He scowls when Ian forces him to drink some water, asks for a beer instead, and when he remembers that they don’t have any beer left he says, ‘Get me my fucking smokes, then.’

Hiding a smile, Ian finds a crumpled pack of cigarettes, taps one out, slides it between Mickey’s lips and lights it with the battered plastic lighter he finds tucked away inside the pack.

Mickey sucks on it weakly, then immediately coughs, the cigarette dropping from his mouth and rolling down his chest. Ian picks it up quickly before it can burn Mickey or set anything on fire. He lifts it to his own mouth, takes a drag while Mickey glares at him.

‘You’re looking better,’ he says at last.

‘No I’m not,’ Mickey retorts petulantly. ‘I feel like dog shit. I’m gonna fuckin’ die.’

‘Yeah, you keep saying that, but here you still are.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘You’ve said that a lot, too.’

Ian leans over and kisses Mickey on the forehead gently, feels him toss his head away in irritation. When he straightens up, Mickey is wearing a mutinous expression, and Ian can’t help but smile when he sees it.

They’re interrupted by a noise from outside, and Ian freezes as he listens. It’s been so long since he last heard that sound that he’s sure he must be imagining it. It sounds alien, wrong, out of place in their new reality.

‘The fuck?’ Mickey mumbles.

Ian rushes out of the room, runs to the front door, where Iggy is standing with his fist buried in a box of cereal, squinting up at the sky.

‘Is that a fucking plane?’ Ian asks slowly, stepping out onto the porch in his bare feet, shading his eyes with one hand and staring skywards.

It’s a fucking plane. More than one, actually. There’s one flying low overhead, and even from this poor vantage point Ian can see two, three more of them over the city.

‘Iggy,’ Ian says, a smile spreading across his face. ‘Iggy, that’s a fucking plane!’

‘Uh-huh,’ Iggy responds. He doesn’t sound too thrilled.

Ian whirls around, grabs the Milkovich brother by the shoulders and shakes him excitedly. ‘Iggy, we’re saved! They’re here to rescue us.’

Iggy just stares at him glumly. ‘Yeah, people used to say that about cops,’ he says. ‘But no cop ever tried to rescue me.’

Ian shoves him away, feeling a flare of irritation at the negativity. He jumps down the steps, not bothering to go back for a coat or shoes, and runs down the snowy street waving his arms over his head.

‘Hey!’ he yells, as if the pilot can somehow hear him. ‘Hey, we’re down here! We’re alive!’

The plane just carries slowly on, indifferent. But then something does happen. Ian slows to a jog, then stands still, staring up in confusion. It’s like grey clouds are forming around the planes, obscuring them from view, the clouds spreading.

Ian takes a few steps backwards, retreating to the Milkovich house, suddenly uncertain.

It’s hard to tell, but it looks like the clouds are descending, getting closer.

‘Oh shit,’ Ian mutters.

He used to watch a lot of war movies. He knows what this is.

His neck craning to stare at the horror overhead, Ian starts running back to the house. His feet are stinging from the cold and as he runs he stubs his big toe on the ground, the agony of it screaming through him as he trips and falls, lands hard. There’s no time to waste, though; Ian drags himself up, limps up the steps of the Milkovich house, leaving a small trail of blood in the snow.

‘Get inside, get inside!’ he yells at Iggy, grabbing him by the scruff of his shirt and dragging him into the house, slamming the door behind him.

‘What is it?’ Iggy asks.

‘They’re gassing us, they’re fucking _gassing_ us, shit.’ Ian grabs his head with both hands, stares around wildly, his heart pounding. ‘Get in Mickey’s room, go!’

He gives Iggy a shove in the direction of the room, then barrels into Mandy’s room and finds Yev blinking up at him sleepily, newly-awakened, already starting to grizzle. Ian picks him up roughly, no time to be gentle, and Yevgeny whines in complaint, rubbing his face against Ian’s shoulder.

When Ian bursts into Mickey’s room he finds his sickly boyfriend, sitting up in bed, staring in confusion, asking weakly, ‘Ian, what the fuck?’ as Iggy stands by the window, peering through the cracks between the boards.

Ian shoves Yev into Mickey’s arms, hisses, ‘Stay there, stay on the bed.’ At Iggy he yells, ‘Get away from the window!’ Then he runs out of the room again, stands in the living room for a moment, lost.

He doesn’t know how long it will take for the gas to descend to ground level. A few minutes at most, probably. He doesn’t know what they’re spraying, but even if he and Iggy can survive it, Mickey is too sick and Yev is too young. Ian needs to do something, he needs to fucking _do_ something, shit.

Ian spots his old wind-up flashlight on the coffee table, and for some reason that’s what spurs him into action. He snatches it up, runs to the kitchen and yanks out a drawer so that it tumbles to the floor, its contents spilling out noisily. He spies the roll of duct tape he was looking for, grabs it. He grabs some food, a big bottle of water, and then his arms are full.

Ian runs back to Mickey’s bedroom, where Mickey is trying desperately to comfort a screaming Yevgeny. Iggy must have filled him in, because Mickey isn’t asking what’s going on any more, just staring at Ian, a kind of resigned despair on his face. Ian dumps the stuff on the bed, sprints back out of the room, runs upstairs, into one of the bedrooms. He cranes his neck, looks out of one of the windows, and nearly pukes in terror.

The gas is close now - a solid ceiling of grey cloud that’s already obscured the tops of Chicago’s high-rise buildings. It will be here soon.

Ian drags the blanket and sheets off the bed, gathers them up in his arms, grabs another blanket that’s slung over a chair on his way out. He jumps down the last five steps, pain singing through his injured foot, pivots into Mickey’s room and slams the door behind him.

‘Here,’ he says, shoving the blankets into Iggy’s arms. ‘Block the gap under the door. _Do it,’_ he adds, when Iggy just stares at him.

As Iggy follows instructions, Ian drags a chair across the room, stands on it, tears off a line of tape and sticks it over the top of the door. Adds another layer. He unrolls the tape again, slams the sticky part against the top right corner of the doorframe, then drags the roll of tape down, stretching it down the height of the door, tearing it off when he reaches the bottom and standing up to smooth the tape flat. He does this for the other side as well, as Iggy presses the blankets into the crack under the door.

It’s taking too long.

Ian runs round the bed to the window, sees that Mickey has put Yevgeny down and is struggling to get up.

‘Stay there,’ Ian snaps harshly.

‘At least let me fuckin’ help,’ Mickey pleads.

Ian grabs the sheet he took from upstairs, tosses it to Mickey. ‘Start tearing that into strips,’ he instructs. He fishes his knife out of his pocket and throws that to Mickey too, to make the job go easier.

Then Ian gets to work, tearing off lengths of duct tape, smoothing them over the cracks between the boards. The window is their only light source, and the room quickly starts to get dark.

‘Hey, I can’t fuckin’ see anything,’ Iggy complains.

‘Good,’ Ian yells back. ‘If we can see light, it means there’s a gap.’ As he glances back, he sees that Mickey has figured out what the sheet is for, has placed a strip of material over Yevgeny’s mouth and nose and is tying it off at the back of his head. Yev whines, reaches up and tries to pull it off, but Mickey stops him.

There’s just one gap left between the boards. Ian peers through it, sees a haze of grey outside. The gas is here. He slams duct tape down over the shaft of light, not much left on the roll now, and that’s when it hits him. A violent pain in his head, roiling nausea that makes him double over, gasping.

‘Ian!’ Mickey yells from the bed, his voice a little muffled.

‘Stay there!’ Ian snaps. He can still see little gleams of light. He tears off more duct tape, his head throbbing and spinning, covers the small cracks, layers the tape up, presses it flat, until finally the last small thread of light is gone and the room is left in pitch darkness.

Then there’s a sudden burst of white fluorescent light and Ian spins around. Mickey is holding the flashlight. Ian staggers across the room, trying to resist the urge to vomit. He’s going for the door but Mickey grabs his wrist, pulls him onto the bed, slings a strip of the sheet over his head and pulls it taut against Ian’s nose and mouth.

‘I gotta get the door, need to check…’ Ian mumbles faintly, but Mickey shakes his head, ties off the sheet.

‘Iggy can do it. Iggy…’ The other Milkovich brother looks up, his makeshift face mask already in place. ‘Check the door, tape it up some more.’

Ian doesn’t see Iggy follow the instructions, but he hears the ripping of the duct tape. His head hurts so, so bad. Ian thinks he might be crying. He’s holding his head, his fingernails cutting into his temples. He must be dying. Anything that hurts this bad has to be killing him.

‘Ian?’ Mickey’s voice is thin, panicked. He’s holding Ian’s head in his lap, his hand cool on Ian’s head. The flashlight is off now and the room is completely dark, except… except for this little crack of light in the baseboard of an outside wall. Ian opens his mouth, tries to shout a warning, but then a fresh wave of pain crashes over his head, takes him under, into blissful oblivion.


	16. Day One Hundred and Twenty Nine

The room really, really stinks. Mickey’s gotten kind of used to it now, after three days, but there’s only so much adjusting that his sense of smell can do. Three guys and a toddler, trapped in an airless room for three days, pissing and shitting and (in Ian’s case) vomiting into an emptied-out drawer from the dresser that they’ve stashed in the corner of the room. It’s a thick, aggressive smell, and the strips of material that they still have wrapped around their faces don’t do much to stave it off.

‘Fuck this,’ Iggy says for about the fourteenth time, standing up decisively and heading for the door. For about the fourteenth time, Mickey gets up off the bed and stands in his way.

‘You better sit the fuck back down before I break your kneecaps,’ he snarls, knowing that the threat doesn’t carry much weight. Even just standing up is still exhausting for him.

‘I want my goddamn crack,’ Iggy complains. ‘I’ve been fuckin’ sober for days!’

‘Yeah, when was the last time that happened? Grade school? Deal with it.’

‘When are we getting out of here?’

‘Twelve more hours,’ Ian replies from the corner, where he’s taken Yev for a toilet break. He wipes the toddler clean as best he can with a rag, then picks him up. Yev is wearing one of Mickey’s old sleeveless shirts, which falls down past his legs like a dress. He seems to have cried himself into exhaustion, lets his head loll wearily against Ian’s chest. ‘Just give it twelve more hours,’ Ian says. ‘Then I’ll go out and check.’

‘Fuck that!’ Mickey snaps. ‘Iggy should go if he’s so fucking desperate.’

‘Oh nice, pick your boyfriend over your own fuckin’ brother!’

It’s been a tense few days.

After he finished sealing up the room, Ian got real sick. He must have inhaled some of the poison gas, and for the first few hours he couldn’t do anything except lie down, holding onto his head, crying in pain. Mickey, still sick himself from the bite, hadn’t been able to do anything and the helplessness had nearly driven him mad. Yev had had a screaming tantrum and it had been left to Iggy to try and comfort him, which hadn’t gone very well. Looking back, the absurd hellishness of it is almost funny.

The second day had been one of quiet misery, punctuated only by the nerve-grating sound of the flashlight being wound up whenever it ran down. Ian, having recovered from the effects of the gas, was still suffering from the symptoms of mania and couldn’t seem to stop moving: pacing back and forth, doing push-ups and sit-ups, keeping obsessive track of how much food and water they had left, taping up imagined cracks in the walls with the last of their duct tape. Mickey had vacillated between sympathy for Ian and a desire to break his legs just so he’d sit still for two seconds.

Not even the smell in the room and the danger outside it had been enough to throttle Ian’s rampant libido, though to his credit he’d at least tried to keep it under control. Mickey had woken up in the night, Iggy snoring on one side of him and Ian on the other with his back turned, and realized that what had woken him up was the quiet movements of Ian jerking off: his fist moving fast, his shoulder shaking, his breath uneven. Being mindful not to wake his brother, Mickey had pressed closer to Ian’s back, kissed the nape of his neck, and Ian had shivered his way through a violently hard orgasm - made all the more intense by having to stay quiet and still.

Now they were on their third day cooped up in this room. The bite on Mickey’s arm was itching like crazy, which Ian said meant that it was healing, but that didn’t make it any less fucking irritating. They were all wound up, tense, ready to snap at each other over the smallest thing. It was a good thing there were no guns in the room, or someone would definitely have gotten shot already.

Apparently resigned to waiting a little longer, Iggy slumps down on the floor, his back against the door, closes his eyes. Ian sets Yev down on the floor so that the toddler can carry on playing with an old remote control car (minus the remote) - the only toy in the room. Mickey sits down on the bed again wearily, and Ian joins him, brushes the backs of his knuckles over Mickey’s cheek in a tender gesture. Mickey closes his eyes, leans into it.

‘You’re looking better,’ Ian says quietly. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Shitty,’ Mickey replies. ‘But more like regular old shitty than about-to-die shitty.’ He glances up at Ian’s face. ‘How about you?’

Ian shrugs. ‘Worst of it passed on the first day. I don’t think I breathed in much of that stuff.’

‘And the…’ Mickey hesitates. ‘The depression?’

A flicker of something that Mickey can’t quite discern passes through the emotions on Ian’s face. ‘It’s hard,’ he admits. ‘Being cooped up. I almost wish I was on a downswing. At least then I wouldn’t mind lying around in bed all day.’

Mickey nods. ‘Well, when Iggy gets his crack, you can get your drugs too.’

Ian looks away.

‘You’re gonna take them, right?’ Mickey presses, raising his voice. ‘I almost fucking died getting that shit for you.’

‘Yeah, and if it wasn’t for the mania I’d probably be dead. I might not have thought of sealing this room up against the gas. I might not have even made it through those first weeks with Yev without it,’ Ian says in a rush that makes Mickey think this is a prepared speech, or at least something Ian has been thinking privately for a while.

And that’s when it occurs to him. Something that he never really fully appreciated, back when he was trying to get Ian to take his meds the first time around. Ian had said “I hate the pills,” and yeah it made sense, what with all the shitty side effects. But there’s more to it than that, Mickey now realizes.

‘You like it,’ Mickey accuses, no heat in the words. ‘Don’t you?’

Ian looks away. He’s silent for a moment. Then he says, ‘I know it’s a disease. But I don’t feel sick. I feel invincible.’

Mickey mulls that over in his mind, grapples with this new insight into Ian’s life, tries to imagine what that might feel like - to feel invincible, unstoppable. Like being on really great drugs 24/7. In this new world they live in, Ian might be right; that’s the sort of thing that could save your life.

Or get you killed.

His train of thought is interrupted by a sound from outside, muffled through the boarded-up, patched-up window, but recognizable nonetheless: an engine. No, more than one. Vehicles coming up the road, crunching to a halt outside the house.

‘Shit,’ Mickey hisses, shifting on the bed, wishing more than anything that he had his guns with him. There’s a set of brass knuckles in the dresser, but that’s it as far as weapons go.

‘Stay quiet,’ Ian says in a slow voice. ‘Maybe they’ll go away.’

There’s a loud _bang_ at the front door. Not the sound of someone knocking; the sound of someone breaking in. There’s a pause, then a second bang, and this time Mickey hears the front door crash open, the sound of the boots hitting the floorboards as people enter the house.

There are voices outside, the words indistinct. People heading up the stairs. Mandy’s bedroom door opening.

Then someone says, right outside, ‘This one’s been blocked off.’

‘Fuck,’ Iggy mutters, creeping away from the door, retreating into the corner of the room.

‘Hey,’ a male voice calls. ‘If anyone’s alive in there, speak now.’

Ian and Mickey exchange a glance. Mickey shakes his head.

‘Fuck off!’ Ian yells at the door. ‘We already accepted Jesus Christ as our lord and savior!’

Mickey drops his head into his hands despairingly.

There’s silence outside. Then quiet muttering. Then the door handle turns, and the door warps a little as someone pushes on it from outside. Then, with an almighty ripping sound as the duct tape is separated from the door frame, the door bursts open and sunlight floods into the room, temporarily blinding Mickey.

‘I’ve got three, no, _four_ alive in here. There’s a kid,’ Mickey hears as he scrubs at his eyes. ‘Go get the census taker.’ To them, the man says, ‘Does anyone in here require medical attention?’

‘Yeah, _you,_ in about ten seconds,’ Mickey retorts angrily. ‘Break into my fuckin’ house, I’ll give you medical attention…’ He finally manages to blink away the spots in his eyes and squints at the person in the doorway, sees a military uniform.

The officer doesn’t look impressed by Mickey’s threats. ‘Sir, we’re not here to harm you,’ he says.

‘You fucking gassed us!’ Ian yells, gathering Yevgeny up into his arms, as if to emphasize the point. ‘You gassed civilians!’

‘The decision was made to deploy a chemical agent in order to eliminate the zombie threat in the city,’ the soldier responds, in what sounds suspiciously like a rehearsed speech. ‘Our estimates indicated there were minimal survivors in Chicago, and the chemical used has a low mortality rate among the living.’

‘A low mortality rate,’ Ian repeats, in what Mickey recognizes as a dangerous voice.

‘Yes. We have treatment available for anyone who was affected.’

Before Mickey can come up with a response to that, there are footsteps outside and the first soldier steps aside, allowing another soldier to enter the room, accompanied by a fussy-looking middle-aged woman with a clipboard and her hair in a messy bun.

‘Full names and dates of birth,’ she says briskly.

‘First name Go, middle name Fuck, last name Yourself,’ Mickey responds, without missing a beat.

The woman looks up from her clipboard, unimpressed. ‘The sooner you give me your names, the sooner we’ll leave.’

Well, OK, that sounds like a good deal. ‘Mickey Milkovich,’ Mickey volunteers resentfully, and rattles off his birthdate.

‘Michael… Milkovich…’

‘Not Michael, you dumb bitch, _Mickey.’_

The woman looks up again, with the same bored expression. ‘I need your given name.’

‘Fine. Mikhailo Milkovich. Spelled M-I-K…’

‘I know how to spell it. You?’ she jabs her pen in Ian’s direction.

‘Uh, Ian Gallagher.’ Ian hefts Yev in his arms. ‘This is Yevgeny Milkovich.’

‘Birth dates?’

Ian gives them, and Mickey is secretly glad that Ian knows when Yev’s birthday is, because Svetlana is the only other person who would know and she’s probably fucking dead.

‘You?’ the census taker asks, jabbing the pen at Iggy this time.

He fidgets nervously. ‘Igor Milkovich.’

‘Your name’s _Igor?’_ Ian exclaims disbelievingly.

Iggy lifts his chin defiantly. ‘Yeah, so what?’

‘Like that fucking hunchback in Frankenstein?’

‘Fuck you!’

‘Birth date?’ the census taker interrupts, sounding irritated now.

Once Iggy gives his birth date, the census taker doesn’t leave right away like she promised. She scribbles down a few more notes on her clipboard, then looks up. ‘Alright. Has anyone in this room been bitten?’

‘No,’ Ian says quickly. But Mickey - like the idiot, like the fucking _moron_ that he is, pulls down his right sleeve nervously. One of the soldiers spots the movement.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ he says, stepping forward, the politeness of the words belied by the roughness with which he grabs Mickey’s arm, tugs up his sleeve. Upon spotting the bite, his grip tightens painfully. ‘This one,’ he calls over his shoulder.

‘Let him go!’ Ian yells, shoving Yev onto the floor and jumping over the bed to try and drag the soldier away. He’s caught from behind, though, the other soldier moving forward to grab his elbows, pull his arms back painfully. The sight spurs Mickey into action and he scrambles off the bed, anchored by the soldier’s grip on his arm, lashes out with his free fist. He’s too weak, though, can’t seem to land a hit. The soldier easily overpowers him, handling Mickey like a hissing feral cat.

‘He’s not sick!’ Iggy pipes up from the corner, his fists clenched, and for some reason Mickey is surprised by how upset his brother looks. ‘He got better!’

‘Even so, we need to examine him, get him some medical attention,’ the census taker says.

Mickey doesn’t like the way she says _medical attention._

He struggles harder, to no avail. Yev is crying: long, distraught wails that fill the room, add to the chaos. Despite his best efforts, Mickey finds himself being dragged backwards, out the door.

‘No!’ Ian screams, thrashing against the hold of the soldier, staring wildly at Mickey. ‘Let him go, let him go, you _fucks!_ You fucking assholes! He’s _fine,_ there’s nothing wrong with him!’

Mickey feels a horrible sense of deja vu: he and Ian being dragged apart, kicking and screaming, by the military. The last time this happened, it ended up with Mickey going to jail. This time, he gets the feeling that it could end even worse.

He stares at Ian, drinking in the sight of his flushed face and messy hair, the desperation in his eyes. This might be the last time Mickey gets to see him. He wants to make the most of it, but there’s not enough time, never enough time. He’s dragged out of the house, closing his eyes in defeat as he listens to Ian’s yells getting farther and farther away.


	17. Day One Hundred and Thirty

After they take Mickey away, things get bad for a while. Iggy goes and slumps down on the sofa with his crack pipe, and Ian grabs all of the crockery in the Milkoviches’ kitchen, carries it outside, and starts throwing it in the street, piece by piece. He yells as he does it, watching plates and mugs and bowls shatter and scatter in shards across the snow-covered ground. Thoughts are buzzing around his head like angry bees and he can’t make them stop. All he can do is shout, and destroy shit.

The sound of Yev screaming is what eventually convinces Ian to pull himself together. He sets the few bits of unbroken crockery down on the porch, wanders back inside. Iggy is high as fuck, staring at Ian like he’s crazy.

He is.

Ian pulls it together for Yev, though, always pulls it together for Yev. He hugs the little boy, whispers apologies in his ear, gives him his dinner. He carries Yev into Mandy’s room, which doesn’t smell so bad, and falls asleep with the toddler curled up next to him. He sleeps for a long time.

* * *

_‘Yevgeny!’_

Ian groans, stirs, then instinctively clings onto Yev as he feels the toddler being pulled away from him. A hand reaches out and slaps him on the forehead, and Ian is momentarily stunned - enough to let Yev go.

Blinking in the thin light of dawn, Ian looks up and sees Svetlana hugging Yevgeny tight, crying and planting wet kisses all over his face, speaking in rapid-fire Russian in between kisses. She looks different - her hair cut very short, wearing baggy men’s clothes and no make-up. Yev recognizes her though, grabs her face and grins and shouts, ‘Mommy!’

 _‘Der’mo,’_ Svetlana snaps at Ian. ‘You teach my boy to speak with American accent?’

Ian sits up slowly, wearily. ‘Nice to see you too,’ he says.

Before he can properly wake up, Svetlana swoops down and plants a noisy kiss on the side of his face, scrubbing a hand through his hair with an aggressive kind of affection. ‘You also kept my boy safe, all this time. So I won’t cut your balls off.’

‘Appreciate it,’ Ian says dully.

Svetlana doesn’t even seem to hear him, is too busy cooing at Yevgeny, bouncing him on her hip. Ian notices that, under the baggy clothes, Svetlana is pregnant again. She must be the most fertile former hand-whore in Chicago.

Then Ian realizes. If Svetlana is back, then…

‘My family?’ Ian says urgently, standing up from the bed to get Svetlana’s attention. ‘Did you see what happened to my family? Are they OK?’

His chest aches in relief when Svetlana nods. ‘They take us to safe zone in Toronto. Canadians,’ she adds, seeing Ian’s surprised expression. ‘Very organized. We live there for months, while scientists work on chemical weapon. Now zombies are wiped out, so they return us home.’ She looks around the room critically. ‘What is left, anyway.’

‘My family? They’re back too?’ Ian presses.

Svetlana nods distractedly, waggling her fingers in Yevgeny’s face and smiling at him. ‘They were on same bus as me.’

‘Holy shit.’ Ian runs his hands through his hair, looks around until he spots his coat, grabs it, heads for the door. Before he can leave, though, Svetlana grabs his arm.

‘Ian,’ she says seriously. It might actually be the first time she’s spoken his real name aloud, instead of calling him “orange boy” or “carrot boy.” ‘Thank you.’

Ian clenches his jaw, nods. He leans over, kisses Yev on the top of his head. Yev waves his chubby little arm and shrieks, ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!’

Svetlana looks at Ian over the top of Yev’s head, her eyes narrowed. Ian shrugs.

‘We will talk about this,’ Svetlana says sternly. ‘Now go.’

Ian starts making his way back to the Gallagher home. He knows he should be sprinting there in excitement, but his legs feel heavy and he can’t quite conjure up the energy. In the back of his mind, he knows what this means, but he doesn’t want to think about it.

There are people in the houses that he passes - not all of them, but a few of them. South Side families who survived, now facing the challenge of trying to rebuild their lives from the rubble. When he’s about halfway home, Ian passes a familiar figure in the street, swigging from a bottle in a brown paper bag.

‘What’s up, Frank?’ Ian says, not bothering to look him in the eye. In his peripheral vision, he sees Frank raise the bottle in a salute as Ian passes him.

Ian turns a corner, and there it is. Home. The door open, figures moving in the window. He approaches slowly, suddenly not quite ready. He can hear voices inside, yelling. The Gallaghers are always yelling. These are the sounds that Ian has woken up to every morning, his whole life, and hearing his family again hits him right in the chest, takes his breath away.

He’s standing at the gate now. The small scrubby front lawn is covered in dead grass and snow. Half of the windows on the front of the house are broken. There are bullet holes scattered across the outside wall. But it’s home.

As Ian stands there, Liam wanders out of the open front door and onto the porch. He stops when he sees Ian, stares at him.

The sight of his youngest brother, alive and well, brings Ian to his knees - literally. He sinks down onto the concrete path, just inside the gate, tears filling his eyes. He holds his arms out, and Liam carefully makes his way down the steps, holding the handrail. Once he reaches the bottom he breaks into a trot and runs into Ian’s arms, and Ian hugs his baby brother fiercely and cries. Cries because his family is OK. Cries because Mickey is gone. Cries because he’s so, so tired.

‘Hey, kid,’ Ian mutters thickly in Liam’s ear, tightening his grip on Liam’s coat. ‘I missed you. I missed you so much.’

‘Liam? Who was watching Liam?’ Ian hears Debbie’s voice from inside the house. _‘Carl?’_

‘Wasn’t me!’

‘Why is no-one watching Liam. _God,_ we’ve been back five minutes and…’

Debbie stops talking and Ian looks up over Liam’s head and sees that she’s standing in the doorway, her mouth open, stunned. He gives her a watery smile, and then she’s running down the steps and skidding to her knees and hugging Ian and Liam.

‘We thought you were dead,’ she sobs. ‘We thought for sure you were dead!’

 _‘I_ never thought you were dead,’ Carl says. Ian looks up again, sees his brother swaggering down the steps, a huge grin on his face. His face looks different. There’s a black eyepatch over his right eye, messy scarring peeking out from underneath it - bad enough that Ian suspects there probably isn’t an eye left under the patch. He’s hit with a pang of pain and anxiety, wondering what Carl must have been through to get an injury like that, but Carl doesn’t seem to be phased by it. God, he’s gotten so tall in just a few months. He even has a whisper of facial hair on his upper lip.

Ian stands up, gently shifting Liam and Debbie off him. He meets Carl halfway between the gate and the porch steps. He holds out his arms, but his little brother only offers a military salute.

‘I’m a man now,’ he says seriously. ‘I don’t hug.’

‘Shut the fuck up,’ Ian says, laughing despite himself, despite the fact that his face is still wet with tears. He pulls Carl into a hug, rubs his knuckles on the top of his head, kisses him on his crown for good measure as Carl makes a noise of complaint and tries to pull away.

‘Where the fuck did everybody-’

The sentence ends abruptly. Once again, Ian looks up at the front door of the Gallagher house.

Lip.

Ian’s big brother, his _only_ big brother. He looks so exhausted that it makes Ian want to start crying all over again. Lip’s hair is shaggy, a patchy beard growing in on his cheeks and chin, dark shadows under his eyes. He looks wrecked, completely drained, and he’s staring at Ian with a kind of wild terror, like he isn’t sure if Ian is real or not.

Rubbing his hand over Carl’s head one last time, Ian moves past him and climbs up the steps. He stops one step below Lip, leans back against the handrail, smiles feebly at him.

‘What’s up, man?’ he asks.

That seems to break the spell. Lip grabs him by the back of his jacket, pulls him up onto the porch, hugs him so tightly that Ian can barely breathe. ‘You sonuvabitch,’ Lip is ranting. ‘You goddamn son of a bitch, Ian. _Fuck.’_ He shoves Ian away suddenly, keeping hold of his shoulders, looking him over for injuries. ‘Look at you, Jesus fucking Christ. You’re so fucking _skinny._ Are you…?’

‘I’m fine, Lip, I’m fine, c’mere.’ Ian pulls his brother back into a fierce embrace.

Lip’s breath are harsh in Ian’s ear. ‘I’m so fucking tired,’ he confesses in a whisper. ‘Shit, Ian, I’ve been trying to hold it together but, fuck, it’s been so hard. I can’t believe you’re here, I can’t believe you’re still alive. When we got back to the house and you weren’t here, I was sure…’

‘I’ve been staying at Mickey’s,’ Ian explains, feeling his chest tighten as he remembers.

‘Mickey Milkovich?’ Lip pulls back reluctantly out of the hug, his eyes red and wet. ‘What…?’

‘It’s a long story.’ Ian takes in his brother’s rumpled appearance again, the deep lines of exhaustion on his face. ‘God, you look wrecked. Where’s Fiona?’

Lip hesitates, looks over Ian’s shoulder at the other Gallaghers. Ian feels panic rise in his chest.

‘Lip, _where’s Fiona?’_


	18. Day One Hundred and Thirty, Part Two

They’ve got him holed up in this shitty trailer that’s deceptively secure, as Mickey learns when he tries to pry open the window. There’s not much in here - just a bunk bed, a sink, a couple of chairs, a table, some food supplies, a toilet - but Mickey decides to exercise his right to protest by making a mess of the place. He unzips his pants, takes a long, satisfying piss in the corner right next to the toilet. He kicks the walls and leaves scuff marks from his shoes. He finds a jar of peanut butter among the food stash, shoves his fingers into it, scoops the stuff out and hurls it so that it splatters messily against the walls.

After that he’s pretty worn out, still drained from his recent sickness, so Mickey pulls the mattresses off both the bunks, stacks them one on top of the other on the floor, curls up and goes to sleep, sucking peanut butter off his fingers.

He’s woken up the next morning by the trailer door opening and instinctively rolls out of bed, his fist clenched, but deflates when he sees a small Asian woman in a white coat, blinking in bemusement at the state of the trailer.

‘Mr…’ She checks her clipboard. ‘Milkovich?’

Mickey scratches his eyebrow with his thumb and nods, suddenly feeling a little embarrassed. The doctor doesn’t even have any muscle with her.

‘Right. Sorry to have kept you waiting,’ she says, as though they’re in a fancy clinic and she’s just come to fetch him from the waiting room. ‘We’ve been very busy, as I’m sure you can understand. I’m Dr. Bradley. Would you like to take a seat?’ She gestures towards the chairs.

Mickey hangs back warily. ‘You here to kill me?’ he asks.

Dr. Bradley stares at him like he’s an idiot. ‘No,’ she says slowly. ‘I’m here to go through your treatment plan with you. Was this not explained?’

Mickey thinks back to how he was brought here, kicking and punching and yelling at the soldiers with every foul curse word he knew. Yeah, maybe he wasn’t the most receptive listener. ‘Nah,’ he says. ‘No one told me anything.’

The doctor sighs in a deeply put-upon way. ‘Right. Well, I’m certainly not here to kill you. That sort of thing doesn’t require a medical degree. I understand you’ve been bitten. May I see?’

Mickey hugs his arm protectively against his stomach. ‘Why?’

‘Just part of the assessment.’ The doctor holds her hand out patiently, waiting.

Eventually, Mickey figures that it can’t hurt to show her. He rolls up his sleeve, exposing the healing red marks, and holds his arm out. The doctor takes it gently in her hand, peers at the marks, prods the edge of them gently with a cool finger. Then she takes a smartphone out of her coat pocket, makes Mickey hold his arm still while she snaps a few photos.

‘Thank you, that’s fine,’ she says at last, letting go of his wrist. ‘Tell me, how long ago were you bitten?’

‘Uh…’ Mickey tries to think. It’s all been a blur, really. ‘A week or two, maybe?’

The doctor raises her eyebrow, makes a note on her clipboard. ‘You were lucky. _Very_ lucky. Not many people survive. Did you get any treatment for it?’

Mickey holds his bitten arm in his hand, rubs a thumb gently over the bite mark. ‘My boyfriend’s an EMT,’ he explains quietly, checking her reaction to see if she’s shocked by the word “boyfriend.” She doesn’t seem to be. ‘He did some first aid stuff, I think. And he gave me… antibiotics. And AIDS meds.’

‘Viread?’

‘Uh. Starts with a “T,” I think...’

‘Tenofovir, yes, that’s the same thing. Are you or your boyfriend HIV positive?’

‘No!’ Mickey retorts angrily, though to be honest he isn’t really sure.

Apparently this shows on his face, because the doctor hesitates for a moment, then says, ‘I need to take a blood sample to confirm the presence of H1T1. I can check for HIV as well, if you’d like?’

Mickey looks at his shoes. Thinks about the guys he fucked in prison, the guys he fucked before he found Ian again. ‘Yeah, OK,’ he mumbles.

They sit down at the table. The doctor opens up her bag, takes out a couple of kits sealed in plastic, opens them up and lays out the contents on the table. As she squeezes the tip of his index finger, Mickey remembers something.

‘H1T1?’ he asks.

‘The zombie virus,’ Dr. Bradley says calmly, pricking his finger with a lancet, grabbing a pipette and slowly drawing out the blood. ‘Your boyfriend’s a smart man,’ she adds, offering him a small smile. ‘The antibiotics won’t have done anything, I’m afraid, but the Viread probably saved your life. It’s not specifically targeted enough to fully treat H1T1, wouldn’t have worked in the long term, but it must have kept your viral load low enough for you to survive the first 72 hours. That’s when the risk of death is highest.’

So. Ian really did save his life. ‘When can I see him again?’ Mickey asks.

Dr. Bradley squeezes his blood into two separate testing kits, adds little bottles of solution. ‘The tests should both produce results within about sixty seconds,’ she answers. ‘Once we confirm the diagnosis, I’ll take you through your treatment plan, give you a supply of antiretrovirals. Then you’ll be free to go.’

Mickey raises his eyebrows. ‘Just like that?’

‘Just like that.’ The doctor smiles.

The wait for the results is tense. Mickey looks around the room, suddenly very conscious of the piss stains on the floor, the peanut butter spattered all over the walls. He chews the inside of his lip anxiously.

‘Well, I have some good news,’ the doctor says, pulling him out of his reverie. ‘The HIV test is negative.’

Mickey feels relief wash over him, but maintains a neutral expression. ‘Like I said.’

The doctor checks on the other test kit, nods. ‘H1T1 test is positive.’

Mickey scratches the back of his head. ‘So, what, I take some pills?’

‘Yes.’ The doctor opens her bag again, pulls out a clear plastic bag containing little orange pill bottles, sets them on the table. ‘You’ll need to take one pill twice a day. Now, I must warn you that these were fast-tracked through testing and there are a number of known side effects. You may experience headaches, nausea, appetite fluctuations, sexual dysfunction, sleep disturbances…’ The list goes on for some time. ‘Here’s a pamphlet with all the information,’ the doctor says at last, sliding it across the table to him.

‘Right.’ Mickey looks down at the pamphlet. It’s very plain, utilitarian: simple black text with no pictures. ‘And how long do I gotta take the pills for?’

Dr. Bradley looks up at him, hesitates. ‘Mr Milkovich…’

‘Mickey.’

‘Mickey. I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong impression but… this is a treatment, not a cure.’

‘What’s the fucking difference?’ Mickey demands roughly.

‘A cure would kill the virus. This treatment just controls it. We don’t have a cure yet. I’m afraid we probably won’t have a cure for decades. We still don’t have a cure for HIV.’

‘So how long do I take the pills for?’

‘Indefinitely.’

Mickey stares at her. ‘Indefinitely?’ he repeats.

‘For the rest of your life, probably. And you need to understand, we aren’t yet entirely certain of the long-term side effects or efficacy of this treatment. Realistically, you may be looking at a shortened lifespan.’

Mickey looks down at the pamphlet, at the bag of pills. Gives a snort of laughter. ‘Lady, I’m South Side. I was always looking at a shortened lifespan.’

He swipes the stuff off the table, stuffs it in his pockets, heads for the door. With his hand on the handle, he pauses, looks back.

‘This thing that I got,’ he says. ‘Could I pass it on to my boyfriend? You know, if we…’

‘No,’ the doctor assures him. ‘It can’t be passed between living people.’

Mickey lets out a breath that he didn’t know he was holding. ‘Cool.’

He leaves the trailer, steps out into a parking lot packed with similar trailers. There are soldiers and medics walking around, and men and women and children in civilian clothes. It’s kind of chaotic. Also, Mickey has no idea where the fuck he is.

‘Hey,’ he yells at a passing soldier. ‘Can I get a fuckin’ ride back to the South Side, since you assholes kidnapped me in the first place?’

The soldier looks him up and down coolly. ‘Talk to the city manager.’

‘Where the fuck do I find him?’

‘Her,’ the soldier corrects, pointing to a hurriedly-constructed temporary building on the edge of the parking lot, surrounded by people.

Mickey heads over to it, rudely shoves people aside to get closer to the front. When he gets inside, there’s a desk covered with papers, and behind the desk…

Mickey grins.

‘Hey, Gallagher!’ he calls out.

Fiona looks up in alarm. She’s wearing an honest-to-god pantsuit, her hair in a neat ponytail, and when she makes eye contact with Mickey she looks absolutely floored.

‘Is that Mickey fucking Milkovich?’ she demands, ignoring a scandalized look from a stuck-up-looking lady with two kids gathered to her side. Fiona moves out from behind the table, pushing people aside, and surprises Mickey by pulling him into a tight hug.

‘Of all the people I thought I’d never see again… holy shit.’ She pushes him back, holds him at arm’s length. ‘You know Ian’s alive, right? I just found his name in the census…’

‘Yeah, yeah, I’ve been with him the past few weeks, he’s been staying with me.’ Suddenly, something occurs to Mickey. ‘Shit, am I gonna have to go back to prison?’

Fiona laughs, sounding a little strained. ‘Yeah, right. We’re still trying to rebuild basic infrastructure. We don’t even _have_ any working prisons right now.’

Mickey raises an eyebrow. ‘Infrastructure, huh? Look at you with the fancy words.’

She rolls her eyes. ‘A lot of people in government got wiped out, and apparently I have leadership skills. This…’ She waves her arm vaguely at the chaos around them. ‘Just sorta happened.’

Makes sense. Hell, if the dead can walk the Earth then a Gallagher getting a cushy government job isn’t so weird. ‘All the other little Gallaghers get out OK?’ Mickey asks.

‘Yeah. And Svetlana too.’

Mickey rolls his eyes. Figures. ‘Can I get a ride back to the South Side?’

‘Sure, I’ll sort something out. Hey, Mickey…’

He looks at her. Fiona seems like she wants to say something, a lot of things maybe, but she holds back. In the end all she says, with a serious expression, is: ‘Thanks. For being there for Ian. Not just now, but…’

‘We’re there for each other,’ Mickey interrupts, shoving his hands into his pockets to try and hide his embarrassment. ‘That’s how it works.’


	19. Day One Hundred and Thirty, Part Three

Ian doesn’t get much time to spend with his family before the downswing hits him hard. After the emotional reunion, he spends a couple of hours forcing a smile as his brothers and sister tell him about their time in the Toronto safe zone. Ian can tell by Lip’s shrewd glances, however, that he’s doing a piss-poor job of hiding his symptoms. The dragging exhaustion that filters right down to his bones. The desire to hide away somewhere in the dark, somewhere quiet, and just shut out the world.

After Ian heads to the back yard for a piss (more to get a break from the conversation than anything else), he finds Lip hanging out in the kitchen, waiting to intercept him on the way back. Ian avoids Lip’s gaze, but all Lip says, quietly, is:

‘You want to go lie down upstairs?’

Ian feels his chest tighten in gratitude. He nods jerkily, and Lip pats him on the shoulder.

‘Go on, I’ll tell them you need to rest.’

It’s a small but absurdly kind gesture, and it makes Ian feel even worse. God, he hasn’t seen his siblings for months, and now that he’s back with them he just wants to be left alone. If Lip noticed his lack of enthusiasm then Ian must have been making it really obvious. He’s a selfish, heartless piece of shit. His family deserves better.

The thought spiral continues like that for some time as Ian crawls into his old bed, curls up under the musty blanket, pulls it over his head to shut out the world. He can hear people talking downstairs, hear the clatter of them starting to clean up the house, knows he should help. But Ian can’t get out of bed. Can’t do anything but lie there.

He falls asleep, he thinks, because the next time he opens his eyes the room is dark. There’s a dip in the mattress next to him, and vaguely Ian wonders who it is. Fiona, maybe. Or Lip.

‘Hey, Firecrotch.’ A rough voice, modulated to a softness that it wears uncomfortably. ‘You hidin’ from the zombies?’

It’s perhaps the only voice that could have stirred Ian at that moment. Slowly, he pulls the blanket down from his head, rolls over. Mickey is there, sitting on the bed, looking down at Ian with a complicated, tender expression.

Mickey’s here. Somehow. Ian doesn’t know how. He wants to sit up, to grab Mickey, to hug him, to jump around the room. But the disease drags him down, keeps him stuck to the bed, under the blanket, unable to move. It takes all of Ian’s effort, when Mickey reaches out and gently pushes his hand through Ian’s hair, to reach up and take hold of his hand.

‘Not coming out?’ Mickey asks, with a rueful smile. ‘Can’t really blame ya, man. How about I come under there instead?’

Ian hesitates, then nods wearily. The bed creaks as Mickey lies down, facing Ian, pulls the blanket up over both their heads. In the close space they’re in, Ian can breathe in Mickey’s familiar smell, feel the heat of Mickey’s body reaching out to touch him.

‘How did you get away?’ he whispers at last.

‘They let me go,’ Mickey replies. ‘Turns out those assholes just wanted to do some tests.’ He pauses for a moment, then says, ‘I brought your pills.’

Ian tenses up, but immediately feels Mickey’s hand come to rest on his hip, rubbing it reassuringly.

‘Just so you have the option. I’m not… it’s your goddamn brain. Whatever you want to do, I’ll go with it.’

There’s so much left unspoken in that fractured promise. The memory of their break-up, of Ian yelling at Mickey that he can’t be fixed, because he’s not broken. Ian’s insistence that his mania is what kept him and Yev alive all those months. Fear. Above all, fear. Ian knows that Mickey is afraid of him leaving, of being left behind again, and that he’d rather have Ian crazy and depressed than not have him at all.

‘You should break up with me,’ Ian says dully. ‘We shouldn’t be together.’

There’s a sharp, ragged intake of breath. Ian is glad that it’s too dark for him to see Mickey’s face.

‘Fuck you, Gallagher.’

‘All I ever do is ruin your life, Mick.’ Ian closes his eyes wearily. ‘You went to prison because of me. You got bitten because of me.’

‘No, you don’t get to take credit for all that shit. I fucked up my life real good all by myself.’

‘I’m a mess, Mickey. Look at me. I can’t even get out of bed. You deserve better.’

‘Yeah? I’m an escaped convict with zombie AIDS. Don’t feed me that shit about how I deserve better. No one else is ever gonna want me, Ian. No one.’ Mickey is breathing harshly, upset, his grip tight on Ian’s hip. ‘And I don’t want anyone else.’

Even under the choking weight of the depression, Ian feels a slow bloom of emotion in his chest. A mixture of ineffable sadness at how little Mickey thinks of himself, and the pressure of knowing how much Mickey thinks of him. Ian slides his hand across the mattress, finds Mickey’s hand where it’s curled up against his chest, slides his fingers over Mickey’s palm. Says, ‘I lo-’

‘Don’t, fucking _don’t_ ,’ Mickey interrupts harshly. ‘Every time one of us says it, we fucking break up. It’s a fucking retarded thing to say. You raised my kid in the middle of a goddamn warzone. You carried me twenty blocks in the snow after I got bit, just to keep me alive. You fucking _killed_ for me, Ian. That’s what matters. Not some stupid Hallmark shit.’

His voice is shaky, and Ian suspects he might be crying. When they first started messing around, Ian thought that Mickey must be a sociopath. He just didn’t seem to care, didn't appear to have any strong feelings about anyone or anything. It wasn’t until later that Ian found Mickey’s biggest secret: the deep core of intense, overwhelming emotion that he’s never able to properly articulate.

“I love you” has never sounded natural coming from Mickey, but now Ian knows that this isn’t because he doesn’t mean it. It’s just too much of an understatement.


	20. Epilogue

‘Ah, fuck.’

‘Fucking watch it!’

‘Goddamn fence.’

‘You nearly landed on my head.’

Mickey glares at Ian as he straightens up, dusting off his coat from where he landed on the ground. ‘You know there’s a huge fuckin’ hole in the fence on the other side, right?’

‘Yeah, but then we’d have to walk around.’ Ian grins lopsidedly as he turns away, looks out over the field.

‘Jesus,’ Mickey says, joining him. ‘This place went to shit.’

The baseball field is overgrown, the lines on the grass long since faded. The pitcher’s mound is a mess of weeds and wildflowers, and there’s a family of stray cats living here now, feasting on the rats and mice that hide in the long grass. A section of seating is completely collapsed, covered in burn marks.

‘I think it’s kinda pretty,’ Ian says quietly.

Mickey shoves him. ‘Fag.’

Ian pushes him back and it turns into a wrestling match, which Ian happily loses, letting Mickey bear him down into the grass, grabbing Mickey’s lapels to pull him in close. Their faces touch, and Ian feels Mickey’s lips pull into a smirk. Ian tilts his head up and Mickey presses down, kisses him, roughly at first and then slower, savoring it. Once he starts kissing he can never seem to stop, craning his neck to keep his mouth on Ian’s even as Ian shoves his coat off his shoulders, down his biceps, fumbles with his belt.

‘Fuck,’ Ian mumbles, the word smeared against Mickey’s mouth. ‘We’re getting too old for this.’

Mickey pushes Ian’s shirt up, exposing the coarse hair and pale skin of his stomach. ‘Who you calling old, Gallagher?’ He straddles Ian’s hips, encourages Ian into a sort of half-crunch so he can pull the shirt over his head. As he’s tossing it aside, Ian sits up further, slides his hands up under Mickey’s sleeveless T-shirt, thumbs his nipple, tilts his head up to kiss the underside of Mickey’s jaw.

Mickey sucks in a sharp breath. Brings his hand to the back of Ian’s head, slides his fingers into Ian’s hair. Rocks his hips, pressing his clothed dick against Ian’s bare stomach, feeling Ian get hard underneath him. Even after all these years, this still makes Mickey wild. Ian’s beautiful fucking body. His big hands. The way his voice drops an octave lower when he asks, _Can I fuck you, Mick? Can I fuck you?_

They shove their jeans down to their ankles and leave them there, too eager to bother with taking off their boots. Mickey sinks down onto Ian slowly. He closes his eyes, his nose filled with the fresh, sweet smell of the crushed grass underneath them. They’re exposed here, but this neighborhood is mostly abandoned anyway, and Mickey needs this. He needs this so much.

He rides Ian with shallow little hitches of his hips, taking what he needs, right where he needs it, one of Ian’s hands working Mickey's cock and the other splayed over his hip. He comes hard, his fingernails digging into Ian’s chest, his face turned sideways and buried into his own shoulder to muffle any noise.

Mickey comes down slowly, with loose rolls of his hips, eventually toppling over and laying down next to Ian in the grass, panting. Ian turns him over onto his stomach, pushes back inside. Mickey closes his eyes, breathes in the smell of dirt and crushed grass as Ian fucks him urgently, coming barely a minute later with one arm wrapped around Mickey’s torso, the other braced against the ground. Mickey can hear the knots in Ian’s back cracking as he works through it, can feel quick puffs of breath on his bare shoulder.

They lie there for a little while afterwards, but it’s cold and uncomfortable on the ground. They get dressed quickly, stagger over to the dugout, kick aside scattered trash and fallen branches and sit down on the bench.

‘We should try to clean this place up,’ Ian says after a while, looking out at the chaos of the baseball field. ‘Pull up the weeds. Clear out all this shit…’ He kicks an empty can away. ‘Maybe we could teach Yev how to play baseball.’

‘Fuck that, man, I do enough of that shit at work,’ Mickey complains. Somehow Fiona persuaded him to oversee reconstruction projects in the city. Who would have thought - a Milkovich actually building something. They’re working on making the L functional again right now, and it’s a real pain in the ass.

Recovery from the outbreak has been slow. Once they established communication again, the estimates came in: three quarters of the global population wiped out. Something like 5.6 billion people. It’s a number that’s too big for Mickey to really comprehend. All he knows is that somehow, miraculously, the majority of people in their weird dysfunctional South Side family have made it.

Mandy had shown up three months after everyone else, moved back into the Milkovich household. Mickey had actually cried when he saw her, and Mandy still hasn’t stopped mocking him for it. Kev and V survived too, and they managed to organize some kind of peace treaty with Svetlana that has the three them managing the Alibi Room again.

Terry’s dead, though. Mickey definitely hadn’t cried about that. Good fucking riddance.

Ian reaches into the backpack he brought, pulls out a knife. Mickey raises his eyebrows in interest, but the next thing Ian pulls out is a can of Coke.

‘Shotgun?’ the redhead suggests.

Mickey ducks his head, laughs at the memories the word conjures up. ‘Fuck, man. It’s not the same.’

It’s the best they can do, though, really. Alcohol fucks with both their meds - leaves Ian trashed and Mickey sick as a dog. Debbie scrounged up a present for them shortly after her return to Chicago - a two-sided “His ‘n’ Hers” pill organizer with the days of the week on it. She’d scratched off the “er” in every “Hers” and replaced it with “i” using a permanent marker. ‘There,’ she’d said. ‘Now it’s super gay.’

Standing up and pulling Mickey up with him, Ian stabs the knife quickly and efficiently into the bottom of the can, hurriedly brings the hole up to his mouth as it starts to spray, pops the tab. After a few seconds of gulping he ducks his head in close to Mickey’s, transfers the can to Mickey’s mouth, Coke spraying briefly onto their cheeks. Mickey swallows the rest of it, closing his eyes and pulling a face as the intense sweetness of the drink flows over his tongue. When the can’s empty, he crushes it in one hand and tosses it onto the ground with the rest of the trash.

They both belch noisily afterwards, the sounds echoing around the empty baseball field. They do pull-ups on one of the supports for a while, but stop when it starts to creak ominously. They make out some more, slowly now, the urgency gone.

It occurs to Mickey that they still haven’t been on a proper date.

‘Damn,’ Ian says, breaking the kiss, and glancing at his watch. ‘I told Lana I’d pick Yev up from school. You wanna come?’

Mickey shrugs. ‘Sure.’ It means he gets to stay with Ian a little while longer, and it’d be good to see the kid again too. Yev still calls Ian “Daddy,” calls Mickey “Uncle Mickey.” One day soon they’re going to have to have a talk with him, explain things. He’s getting big now.

They leave the dugout side-by-side. Mickey looks up at the fence with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. ‘Ah, fuck,’ he says. ‘Not this again.’

Ian smiles. He ruffles Mickey’s hair, drops a hand onto his shoulder, steers him away from the fence.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘We’ll take the long way around.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


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